Had a Good Time, page 17
I put Charlie down on the ground. “You should have a coat on outside.”
“It’s warm today,” he says.
I say, “Neglect not thy cloak in winter.”
“Is that in the Bible, Pa?”
“Lest a wind come suddenly up and freeze thy butt,” I say.
Charlie laughs. “There’s nobody’s butt in the Bible,” he says.
“You’d be surprised what is,” I tell him, but I clear up one thing. “Still and all, that was a ‘Sayeth your pa’ you just got.”
“And your ma,” says Beulah who’s standing on the porch and I’m feeling real tender about her.
“Beulah,” I say, “thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.”
She makes a sorrowful face.
“It’s Solomon talking to one of his wives,” I say. “It’s real good.”
“Thank you for the interpretation, Pastor Hurshel,” she says. “You know I’m touchy about the size of my nose.”
“The tower of Lebanon was a beautiful thing to King Solomon,” I say, “like as your nose is to me, Beulah Hudgens.”
She shrugs her shoulders and we go in and I’m all in a bother through suppertime, not knowing what to say about meeting the Lord our God in a white linen suit. Then finally Charlie is sleeping and he’s doing okay, sleeping real quiet without the bad dreams, and Beulah and me sit down together at the kitchen table with some coffee and the Bible out between us.
Beulah sighs and sips at her coffee. “He just won’t take his Castoria, even if his tummy is acting up. He says it’d be better for him to be cured by faith.”
So I say, “You remind him that when Jesus cured the blind man outside the temple in Jerusalem, he had to spit on the ground and make some clay and put it on the man’s eyes and then the man had to go and wash off the clay for the miracle to work. So you might could use some Castoria and it still be the hand of God.”
Beulah touches the Bible and cocks her head a little.
“Gospel of John, chapter nine,” I say.
Beulah smiles. “You’re ready to go do that preaching, I’d offer.”
It’s come time to tell her or not. And I have heard the words of God as written in scripture, every one of them true and holy, and in Deuteronomy, chapter four, God’s beloved Moses says, “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it,” this right after he’s destroyed every man, woman, and child of Bashan, which was about threescore cities’ worth, after doing likewise to all the folks of Heshbon, and so you got to think God’s pretty serious about that point, and since he is, you have to consider how Paul says to “suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” So if I was to ask Beulah to tell me what to think and what to do about this visitation, I’d be putting her in a position that’s against the word of God. If enough of these things add up, who knows what might befall Sparta, Tennessee, and thereabouts. Besides, if I told her about God talking to me and smoking a cigar, she’d think her Hurshel done gone crazy. I would hate that.
“I do believe it’s God’s will,” I say.
“Praise the Lord,” Beulah says.
I’m feeling bad. This is my beloved Beulah. I’m feeling special, too, like God and me have a secret, but I’m feeling bad holding back from this woman that read me every word of the Bible over and over so that I could get it up by heart. And now I’m feeling like it’s all going to disappear anyway, the words I’ve heard and remembered and the calling to preach, it’ll just up and vanish like the way the Lord my God did on the path.
“Well,” I say to Beulah, “if it don’t work out I’ll just get Ernest Porter, and him and me can go back to being clowns.”
And Beulah says, “You’re good at anything you put your hand to.”
Beulah always was one to encourage me.
“If there’s things I need to do on my own ...” I say and sort of hesitate.
“You do those things,” Beulah says to me right quick.
“Or keep to myself ...” I say.
“This all is between you and the Lord,” she says, and I like to jump up and kiss her right then. But we just hold hands across the table.
Then over the weeks that follow I go to finding myself a place to put up a big tent for my preaching, and I have to choose between the valley all along through Sparta, or off a few miles in the Cumberlands, up the mountains among the shortleaf pine and the white oak and the chestnut oak and the sourwood, which I love to be among. But I choose the valley after all, not wanting to make an expedition out of it for folks. So I put my eye on the picnic meadow on the bank of the Calf Killer River just south of town, mindful that “no prophet is accepted in his own country,” as Jesus himself said in the gospel of Luke, but these here are the souls I care most to save from the wrath of God by them hearing and heeding his true and holy word unvarnished.
So I get Beulah to do up some posters and I go all around White County, even unto Walling and Bon Air and Doyle Station and Yankeetown and Onward and Peeled Chestnut, and I tell all the folks around these parts that the word of God will be preached without leaving out the tough things and that’s the way God wants it and they should all come to listen.
And a good many of them do.
Yesterday night I finally do my preaching. The only little bit of show I set up isn’t really show at all, it’s just like having a singing leader or something. Ernest and Roy agree to sit on opposite sides of the congregation and start off the Amens whenever I say something that a right-attentive group of revival-goers should offer up a spiritual you-betcha for. And there’s pretty near a couple hundred come to the tent, and I know the old man in the white suit has a hand in the turnout. He has put it on quite a few hearts to come. Beulah is in the front row and Charlie’s beside her ‘cause if you shouldn’t spare the rod on a child then you shouldn’t spare the word either, no matter where it leads.
It’s sundown and we light candles on stands for when the dark comes along, and I have got up a big old wooden cross at the preaching end of the tent, and after a time, everybody comes in. I suppose I should do a few hymns just to make people feel sort of comfortable, but most all the hymns are the words of men and this is the church of the word of God, and so when they settle down and are quiet, I start to preaching. And I follow the advice of Jesus himself when he sent his disciples out to preach: “Take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate, but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye.”
So I just clear my throat and look out at these folks from my county and I say, “It says in the Bible more times than I can count, ‘Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God.’ And I do, brothers and sisters.”
And I start to tell them all the holy words that have been running around in me for weeks, about the people of Midian and of Bashan and Heshbon but also Makkedah and Libnah and Lachish and Gezer and about all the other cities and nations that were destroyed down to every last woman and child by the chosen tribes, and these destroyed folks had the wrong ideas about who God was and all, but they didn’t have any chance to think otherwise, and even when God sent Moses to Egypt to perform miracles so they’d know the tribes of Israel was in touch with the one true Creator, God said he’d make a point to harden the Pharaoh’s heart—he didn’t soften his heart or even leave it up to the Pharaoh himself—God personally hardened his heart—and all those other nations, God didn’t even give them a chance to see a sign or wonder or hear his own true words, if you was in the way of the chosen ones and you been left to figure out the world for yourself ‘cause nobody ever come to you with the truth, then you’re doomed to be slaughtered, in this life and the next. And I’m careful as I preach all this to quote the words in the books and the chapters and the verses that’s in the holy scripture, and the first few times that I say something like “we took all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed the men and the women and the little ones” Ernest or Roy would give me up an Amen, but that soon stops and a terrible silence comes over the folks out there before me. But these are the words you can’t add or subtract from, and I go on to tell about how even if you’re worship-ing the one true God, you got to watch yourself. ‘Cause God said if a guy gathers some sticks on the Sabbath, kill him. If a guy curses, kill him. If a child is stubborn, kill him. There are no Amens about this. There’s even some stirring in the congregation, and a few are starting to slip along the rows, kind of ducking a little, and heading for the exit. I’m looking out at the people and I say, “These are the words of God, what you’re supposed to do. There’s nothing in the Bible to take them back. Jesus himself said, Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets.’ The Bible don’t tell you to do some of this all the time and do some of it when you’re of a mind to. Here’s two things the Bible says, one right after the other, Leviticus, chapter nineteen, verse eighteen says, ‘Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself,’ and verse nineteen says, Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed, neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee.’ And then just a few verses later—all of this is put out equal and forever and holy—’Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard,’ and then two verses later, ‘Do not prostitute thy daughter.’ You’ve loved your neighbor, but have you minded the mixed cloth in your clothes? You looked after your daughter, but what about your beards? And me standing here bare-faced, I know. I’m afraid for all of us. And some of you shouldn’t even be in a church, by God’s commandment. If you’re wounded in the stones—men, you know what I mean—then you got to get on out of God’s house. If you was born out of wedlock or your daddy was or your granddaddy, all the way back ten generations. You got to get on out.”
By now they’re running from the tent.
“Which is probably me too,” I cry. “My own granddaddy was none too reliable in that way.”
Beulah is beside me now, taking me by the hand.
“Maybe we should give an offering,” I say.
“It’s okay, Hurshel,” Beulah says real soft.
“God asked for five golden hemorrhoids once as an offering,” I say. “It’s there in First Samuel, chapter six.”
“Let’s get on home,” Beulah says. “We’re fresh out of golden hemorrhoids.”
It’s not the way I expected things to go. So here I sit and night has fallen and my family is asleep and I’m waiting for God to knock on my door in a white linen suit. Am I crazy? I think I even ask this out loud, here in the kitchen, sitting alone at the table with the holy word of God lying there before me and whispering away in my head even still. “The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil,” I say, which is right there in Proverbs. I’m bruised all over, is what I’m thinking.
Then there’s a knock at the door.
It’s low, just for me to hear. He knew to come round to the back. I fear the Lord my God. But I rise and cross the room and I open the door and there’s God in his linen suit with no wool mixed in, for sure. “Evening, Hurshel,” he says.
“Evening,” I say.
We look at each other for a moment through the screen and he says, “Ain’t you going to invite me in?”
My legs are fixing to crumple up underneath me again.
“You didn’t disappoint me,” he says, which was exactly the fear I was having, that I did.
I try to speak, but no words come out. And still I’m just standing there with the screen door between us. I smell his cigar smoke, though he doesn’t seem to have one lit.
Then he says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him and will sup with him and he with me.”
Which is Jesus’ words that John heard in his own head when he had a vision of his Lord in the book of Revelation, which means I’m still dealing with God here, no doubt about it, to be quoting Jesus like that, and he’s maybe telling me I’m not crazy, ‘cause John wasn’t crazy, was he? In spite of his going on to see a beast with seven heads and ten horns and one with two horns like a lamb and speaking as a dragon, whatever that’s like? Let him who has ears hear, I guess.
“Buck up, boy,” God says and my legs suddenly straighten, and I push the screen door open and God steps into my kitchen.
He looks around and sort of sniffs at the air. “Pot roast,” he says.
“Yesterday,” I say.
He nods like he knew that.
“You like to sit?” I say.
“Sure.” And he does, taking off his Stetson to show a full head of thick white hair with a tight rolling wave in it like he’d gone to town and had it marcelled.
“Coffee or something?” I ask.
“Nope. Sit down, Hurshel, and let’s talk about how much you love me.”
I sit. “You are the Lord my God,” I say.
“That’s right. But do you love me?”
And I’m put in mind of the time when the children of Israel were tired of running around the desert and wanted to go back to Egypt and God was ready just to wipe out the whole bunch of them—this was in the book of Numbers—and Moses more or less said to God, Oh no don’t do that, you’ll look bad to the Egyptians if you wipe out the people you’ve just delivered. Everybody 11 talk and they won’t know what a compassionate and swell God you are. And God changed his mind. You have to curry the old man up a little sometimes.
And even as all this is going through my head, he’s watching me close. “So?” he says.
“You bet I love you,” I say.
“So you’ll keep all my commandments,” he says.
“I’m real sorry about the beard,” I say. “It didn’t come to mind till last night. Beulah has always liked to touch me on my cheek.”
He waves his hand. “Later,” he says. “I’ve got one for you right now.”
“Okay.”
“You did what you could last night. I hardened their hearts.”
“You did? I thought it was me.”
“Of course it was. But they weren’t supposed to hear, and you were supposed to make a fool of yourself for me. That’s love.”
I nod and try to sort this out.
He goes on right away. “Here’s what you need to do. Tell me about the twenty-second chapter of Genesis.”
And all the sudden the blood feels like it’s drained right out of me and into the floor and I try to think this isn’t really God sitting in front me but just a few moments ago he even quoted Jesus and I have the knowledge of who he is sitting in my heart and I know just how he’s acted all along, pretty much from the beginning of the world and down to the bugs in the field, so what he’s saying is next shouldn’t surprise me.
“Speak up,” he says.
“That’s when you asked Abraham to offer up his son’s life on the altar.”
“You bet,” he says.
“But then you stopped him,” I say.
“Don’t go assuming anything about that,” he says. “I had real plans for Isaac. And if Abraham knew what you know—if there was a previous time when I’d let the father off—then Isaac would’ve had to die. Otherwise it’s not for real, his being willing to make this sacrifice God’s asking him for. You see my point there, Hurshel?”
I’m afraid I do, but I keep my mouth shut. My hands have taken to trembling ‘cause I know what’s coming next.
“Okay,” God says. “You shall love the Lord your God more than anything. So take now that there butcher knife on the counter and go up to thine only son Charlie, whom thou lovest, and cut his throat in his sleep.”
I feel like Lot’s wife must have felt turning around and peeking at Sodom. It’s like I’ve turned into a pile of salt. I’m heavy and hard inside, a stack of something you could just shake out onto the ground and the wind would blow away. I’m look-ing God in the eye and he’s come to me personal, which don’t happen all that much. Even Peter and Paul never spoke about seeing God face-to-face.
“You been chosen is why,” God says. “I pick the humble to love me the most. You know that.”
Then all the sudden I get my strength back. I’m full of a jerky jump-up kind of energy and I push back from the table and I step over to the counter and pick up the butcher knife and I turn back to God and hesitate for a moment, and once more he’s right there in my head dealing with my hesitations.
“Cut her throat too,” he says.
I feel my head nod yes.
“I’ll wait for you out in the yard,” God says.
Then my legs move me around the table and across the floor and through into the hallway and down along to our bedroom, and it’s dark but I know the way and I don’t even have to look to step over a tin truck of Charlie’s, I just know it’s there, and I would’ve had to fuss at him in the morning for leaving it where his pa could trip on it coming in to bed but there’s no need for that now ‘cause he ain’t going to have another morning, and I’m quaking inside something fierce now and tears are streaming down my cheeks, I realize, ‘cause the Lord my God is a savage God and he is a needy God, and I’m in the bedroom and crossing the floor and the bed is before me and Beulah is curled up on her side facing this way with the sheet hooked over her shoulder, and there, on his side, his little face floating-like in front of Beulah’s bosom, is Charlie, and I am before them and my heart is pounding like an automobile engine in my ears and backfiring loud bang bang my eyes are blurred so I can hardly see and I lift the knife in my hand for love of the Lord my God who’s sitting off somewhere waiting for me to do this terrible thing that fits right in with the world he’s fixed up for us to begin with, and Charlie makes a sigh in his sleep and stretches his neck a little and mutters a thing from his dreams that I can’t make out, my little boy sleeping, my beloved son, and he’s a sweet little boy who might leave a tin truck in his daddy’s way without thinking but who cups his hands around a lizard on the kitchen wall and carries the critter outside to set him free, and who loves his father, and I struggle with my hand that has risen up and that wants real bad to go forward now and do the will of God, but I am a weak man, and maybe I don’t love God enough but I struggle hard now with my own right hand, and I have the use of my left hand and I grab the wrist above the knife and my right hand wants something powerful to obey its creator and it has plenty of proof that’s the way it should go, ‘cause there’s countless people who went under the knife for somebody else’s righteous love of God, and all my left hand can come up with is that “God is love,” which comes into scripture pretty late, and elsewhere in the holy word the love of God has a bad outcome for a whole lot of folks, but I stand above the bed where my wife and my son are sleeping and I struggle on in the dark and my boy murmurs again in his sleep, and it’s Pa he’s saying that there’s my pa, and I pull hard at the knife hand trying to get it away from my son and then all the sudden my right hand just lets up and falls.
