The Preacher's Pilgrimage

I

AT the end of the rails New York was, and, beyond New York, Palestine; and now after eighty years’ desire — now when he stood on the back porch of his life with the best doors latched behind — he felt that nothing he had ever known, even in the most high-living days, would equal this. He was tired, though, and half glad New york was a long way off, not to be reached till morning. But, once in Palestine, he would not ever be worn out again, or low in faith — this much he knew beyond all doubting.

In his mind, sometimes, he had been great Moses reborn and moving alive among his people; but when the winters came, and the shacks were paper in the snow, he knew himself to be an old man, and an old man too tired to hold out against Grant Williams — Grant Williams, who was not flesh or devil, but voice of a changing world. In summer the gourd vines grew enormous and climbed the perilous pillars of the stoop, casting huge shadows of their leaves across the floor, and Arnold thought of Jonah, and of how Jonah tried to escape God but had found no place to hide; and while the days were warm Arnold’s faith was full sun, and blazing, so that it could carry him about preaching the Lord’s love and hate, and denied his age. But in winter the porch looked like a rickety-legged old spider, and the floor was pooled with icy air; and Looey would yell out every hour, ‘Shut the doah! Foh Gohd’s sake, shut the doah!’ The old outhouse would then be no more than a pile of sticks against the east wind from the river; Kate would go and look out of the kitchen window, scratching her nails against the plastered frost, and examine the empty shelves and the closet, and glance at him and past him as if saying, ‘ Arnold’s a man of Gohd

— he not responsible foh this. . . . Pray foh us, preacher; pray foh us.’ And Arnold would pray until his own words fitted around him warm and thick as woolen comforts, but he could see that Kate was cold under all her great black flesh, and that old Looey shriveled until she looked the way starving grackles do.

It was two winters ago that Grant Williams had started talking — started climbing up on boxes, with his big hollow face looming down upon the Negroes, and his glasses shining out in the light of oil lamps. He called them sheep — dumb black sheep — the same that Arnold called them on Sunday in the church. ‘Ye are the sheep of my pasture. . . . He leadeth you beside the still waters.’ Sheep of my pasture — but in Williams’s mouth the word had a whipped-cur sound. He talked low and hard, and his words seemed to thud against their minds like a hammer driving. They listened and growled among themselves and kept what he said in the side of their minds they lived by, and came each Sunday to hear Arnold preach about the lowly, and the carnelian mansions of a dream, and the corridors where the Lord walked in the glare of giant light bulbs.

But the Lord got dimmer when the factory shut down. ‘He’s a stingy Gohd!' Kate said. ‘A mean Gohd!’ She shook her puffy fists at the ceiling, and the east rain leaked down the wall paper, dribbling into buckets on the floor. They had to pull Looey’s bed out from the corner into dry space, though Arnold saw that she felt ashamed and exposed with the children crawling on all sides of her, with no wall or corner shadow to hide in, and that she kept her eyes shut, mortified with being set out in the room, as if she were already laid out and the neighbors come to peer at her corpse.

Paul sat around the house all day, drumming on the window, and was gone all night. ‘Why don’ you work?’ Arnold exhorted him. ‘Why don’ you bring some money in to Kate?’

‘Fact’ry closed,’ Paul said. ‘Ain’t no more wuk.’

The children yiped and howled and played like hell’s imps along the floor, and crawled on Looey’s bed to warm their feet. They had no shoes to speak of, nor any sweaters. Kate sat all day with her feet in the stove oven; once she struck at Paul with a halfcharred stick of wood, and yelled sometimes at the children to ‘keep scarce’ of Looey.

Arnold would sit quiet in a corner, thumbing Bible leaves or copies of the Christian Courier; he liked their rich and holy covers, lighted up by rays of an unearthly sun. Magdalene and Mary and Jesus with His lambs were nailed up and down the walls, and John the Baptist was grown gray in the trickle where the roof leaked down.

II

It was in the Courier that he had found the great dream made possible — the gate half set ajar to divine adventure and release. Here it had offered without obligation or return, to all ministers subscribing, a journey to the Holy Land with part expenses paid and special rates. The dream made possible, but not imminent, for there was still the train ride to New York, and the one word ‘part,’ which left the Lord to poke around and brush up all the rest. But that it was a thing not wholly beyond reach led Arnold’s tired old mind through a labyrinth of scheming and nosing about for some way to find money — some way that a minister might use — and make money grow where no money ever was. But every corridor of plan was a blind alley leading nowhere. Yet the thought persisted and stayed with him, growing in his mind in the way of all great unfulfilled dreams.

He used to read long passages from the Bible to himself, and felt warm and comforted until he saw Paul’s sour and brooding face, and poor old Looey’s outraged dignity, and all around him doubt — doubt like a devil sitting there in Looey’s bed, doubt in the slime trickling through the roof, doubt in Kate’s swollen, shiny face, in the water soup and the last bean jars. ‘Justify us, show us Gohd’s mercy. Wherefore persecutest thou me, O Lawd ? . . . I done what I could. I’m old, Gohd. . . . You seen me through worse than this. You seen Harley lynched. You seen the white beas’ and the flame. You heard me say, “Thy will be done’’ when the rope was there and I heard him howl. . . . Don’ let me down now into dark!’

‘Like sheep in the shambles’ — that’s what Williams had said. ‘Don’t let God’s mercy make you forget man’s hate. Go put on your wings and plat’num shoes when you die, — go sail all around God’s Heaven when you die, — but don’t let any black preacher say that you have to live like a hog in a wallow, or squirm under white toes till Gabriel blows his horn!’ That’s the way he had talked — all the time. He was like a Saul of Tarsus who had seen new light, and was too full of it to hold.

Arnold would pray, ‘Lawd, give us patience unto our sufferings,’ and Williams would shout out in Ike Baker’s barn: ‘How long — how long are you going to live like this? Don’t stand and wait for the ravens’ coming!’ ‘Crow bait and vulture meat’ he called them, and they felt he was not wrong. It takes manna to feed faith, and no manna ever came.

The ache got into Arnold until it felt like fire running through his back, but he had gone on preaching anyway. Each week-end he had crept out to the church, grave-cold and damp, and sometimes he lighted the stoves himself. The people came and the church was always full, and back in the corner he could see the gleam of Williams’s glasses like round, malignant eyes, watching him, remembering everything, as though there went on between them some unacknowledged battle for the lives and souls of each one in the room. The congregation came to listen to what he had to say so that later they could hear Grant Williams twist it round, and show it up, and dangle his words before their mud-poor, grinning faces.

But it was not so much of Williams that Arnold was afraid, as of something that was coming over himself. At night, when he was tired, he could hear the fierce grunting of the hungry sows under the floor, and the beans tasted sour, and Kate would yell out at Paul, ‘You leave me be — I’m tard,’ and Looey would whine out to him, ‘Make ’em keep still, Ahnold! Make ’em keep still, cain’t you? Make Gohd shut ’em up, Ahnold!’ and her pain would come whistling up the throat and push out in long, wavering sighs. Then he would think it was age — old age coming on him, an old man edging in where his own flesh used to be.

This would comfort him awhile, since age was only the top rung of a ladder, and close above he would soon bump against the trapdoor to immortality and Heaven. But later on, in the night, fear would come slinking back into his head, though the house was quiet, and even though he felt more warm and strong-confirmed in body than he had for days; and the fear would be a voice whispering things like the words he heard Paul’s sister say when she thought he was gone out of the house. ‘He’s a good Gohdpreacher, Paul,’ she had said. ‘He’s a good man, Reverend Ahnold. But Gohd is gone away. Gohd’s dead. He is no mo’. And Ahnold preach dead words.’ These were the things that came into his mind: ‘ Gohd is no more. . . . You preach tomb words. . . . They ask for bread and you feed them words.’ He felt then that it must be the Devil, not old age, that made him doubt — the Devil come, like a slime mould creeping, to fill up his mouth and choke back the channels of the Lord.

After a time, however, he had stopped preaching about false prophets and wolves that came calling themselves Messiahs, though he felt that he had betrayed his God in not denouncing Williams. He began to doubt even himself, to think perhaps it was not that the Lord was gone away, but that he was no longer a vessel for the Lord, that he was nothing but a rusty pot defiling Him when he stood each Sunday in the pulpit.

III

It had been a long low winter, the last before he left, with rain and gray fog so thick that the river was gone out of sight, and the boat whistles sounded like lost souls tooting out of Purgatory for release. The children looked like beetles, as if all flesh were sliding out of their arms and legs and going to swell their stomachs out. The Sunday collection of dimes dwindled, shrunk to pennies.

Looey died in February, and he preached the service at her funeral, momentarily roused to his old eloquence and strength, but no longer full of scouring exhortation to repent. ‘You all knew Looey; you knew my wife good. She died in trust.’ It seemed too carnal and earthly to say that they had loved each other, that it was Looey who had made him feel God manifest on earth when they were young.

‘Old Looey died in meekness and believing,’ Ike told Williams when the funeral was over. Ike was old and fat, and he thought Williams’s gospel asked of a man too much energy and singleness of thought. He liked to think that the ravens would bring more than pork some day — in the meantime pork was pretty good.

‘Looey died dirt-poor and ashamed,’ Williams had answered back. ‘I don’ want my wife to die like that!’ He let words fall like a stone in water, and the ripples went out on every side in big increasing circles, making Arnold seem like a preaching child. ‘He’s an old man, a good man,’ Williams said, ‘ but you don’ belong to him forever. This is no world for old men to go preaching in forever.’

After a long time spring had come crawling in, and Arnold had planted seeds in the lumpy yard, ringing round his plots with empty bottles. The sparrows built huge strawy nests in every shed, and wrens made their homes in the empty buggy seats. Things changed on earth, but not in people. ‘Give me some more faith, Lohd!’ Arnold would pray. ‘Make His meekness manifest in truth!’ And Williams would talk all through the raw spring evenings: ‘Lead the people out of bondage! There’s Bible words that you can use! There’s a thing to live by, and to march with! There’s the voice of God we need!’ And the people were like a colony of ants, disturbed and running in all directions, not knowing what to think; but they went on living in the same scratch-soil and helpless way.

After a while it seemed to Arnold that not only for his own sake, but for God’s, he ought to take this pilgrimage. If he walked where Jesus had walked, he might be healed. The stitching of His garments had trailed on the stones, and, God never dying, His virtue might still be there on the rocks. By going there, he might come to know; faith’s cracked old vessel might be refilled, and he would return like Moses, with a light so blinding that his people could not see him for the glare.

Often, when the cold May rain washed down the glass and trenched the lilac roots, and the house was never dry, he sat there by the window, hot burning in his back, and his hands too knotted up even to turn the Bible leaves — sat there thinking of all he had heard or visioned of this Jerusalem: the high white air, and the hot blue sky, and the shimmering towers of the temple places; the olive trees with gnarled trunks and varnished leaves, and deep shade over the white road dust.

He thought of himself coming home full of faith and some huge vision — vague but great — of how the people could find a way by belief alone, and not go blundering in Grant Williams’s path with a Lord called Justice instead of God. In September the ship would sail, and return in March, and he saw himself coming back in intolerable brightness, the winter past and buried, the warped lilacs bursting into leaf, and himself strong, certain, made wise by holy earth.

IV

He spent long, shameful hours thinking of money, and sometimes forgot to eat unless Kate reminded him. At first she believed he was in the clutch of a Holy Visitation, and was afraid to thrust herself into his deep preoccupation, but she remembered Jesus walking and eating in the fields of grain, and would push his plate toward him until he came out of the thinking haze. Then, one day, she found the notice cut out and pasted in his red hymn book, and was as shaken by it as if the boards had gone out from under her. Her first reaction was fear, her mind clumping away in terror from the unknown, then anger that he had said no word of this to anyone, and at the end a quickswollen pride that he was her father and a preacher and might go to Jerusalem and walk where Jesus walked. She had turned to him, though, fiercelooking and indignant, demanding what he aimed to do.

’I don’ know,’ Arnold said. He felt ashamed, betrayed, and glad to be found out. ’I aim to understand — to understand Gohd better. Going to find what’s left of where his old place used to be.’

At these words Kate saw him coming back soaked with God-healing, the people falling down before his light. Already Arnold seemed translucent; tongues of flame seemed to jump up and down around the mild gray nimbus of his hair. She felt it would be fitting to kneel down and pray.

‘But I ain’t the money,’ Arnold said, and the great light was punched out for both.

Kate sat down slowly in her chair and wiped a spoon mechanically on her apron — wiped it and stared into its shallow face. ‘I ain’t none either, Ahnold, nor has no other nigger, here or any place. You got to stay at home.’

They sat there a long time, uncomfortable, watching each other, uneasy and cautious, both in their minds creeping nearer the one hope, circling round it, afraid to show that they knew it there.

‘He could use the funeral money,’ thought Kate, ‘could use it now. It’s a lot of money to keep till death.’

‘I could use the funeral money,’ came the echo in Arnold’s mind. ‘But what’ll Kate think? What’ll the people say? “Preachah going to his grave worse than anybody else. Coffin looks like a dog’s burying box. Gohd must ’ve cast that preachah off His book. . . . Goin’ to his grave like a porehouse uncle!” It would bring shame to the dignity of God, making it look like God had forgotten the preachers of His Word.’

It had come to Kate that he was wrestling with his spirit, and it came to her too that his mind was on the funeral money, that he was mortified at giving even standing room to such a thought. She spoke aloud then, quickly, before her courage humped away and left her. ‘Why don’ you use the funeral money, Papa? Livin’ means more than a swole-up show to Death! She held her fat hands tight together. This might be either blasphemy or blessing, and it was well to pray. ‘O Lohd, fohgive me if I done some wrong. . . . Receive me into Thy fold same as if I hadn’t done it. . . . Fohgive us our trespassers. . .

But Arnold was not outraged or in a fury. The ghost of a toppled dignity passed over his face and left a worried smile.

‘You think I could do that, Katy? You think it a reverent thing to do — honorable in His sight?’

‘I do,’ Kate said. Her conviction seemed to come from some immortal source, and made her feel like the secretary to Almighty God.

V

When it had become known that the Reverend Arnold was leaving, — Kate having spoken of it as a secret, to be told again by everyone with a speaking mouth, — an awe and sudden conscience took possession of his people. They were poor still and plagued with troubles, but one among them was going on a pilgrimage to return with Truth, and they came now on Sundays, not to hear what Williams could deny, but as disciples who seek to grasp some goodness by hearing the words of him who could redeem them all.

The Sisters of the Eastern Star collected three dollars out of nowhere, and gave Arnold a stick pin big as a flash light, and the King’s Daughters worked all summer on things that he could never use — woolen scarfs large enough to smother God Himself, woolen socks for some great giant’s feet, with heels like the rudders to a ship. ‘Pray foh us, preachah, pray foh us,’ they said. ‘Remembah us in prayer.’ It was like the old years again, before Grant Williams had begun to sow discord.

Five dollars Arnold had set aside for presents, for souvenirs of great Jerusalem, for tangible evidence and proof of pilgrimage. The rest he sent on to the Courier office, receiving a signed acknowledgment and much advice. A list of the ministers who had gone this way in other years came with it, and Arnold recognized the names of a few — the Reverend Dr. Brail of the white Baptist church, and Fish of Belleville’s High Episcopal. It pleased him in a very earthly way to think of Fish succumbing to low rates and half expenses paid — Fish with his orchid congregation, serving cake in place of bread at his communions. He thought of going to call on Dr. Brail to ask him for advice, but was too proud. He left it all to the Courier and the Lord, and spent most of his time in long waking dreams of Palestine.

For three weeks before he left, his trunk had stood open on the floor and Kate had put in things as she thought of them, for fear something might be forgotten — five half-empty medicine bottles . . . his overcoat . . . two long bars of laundry soap ... a box of matches. Arnold protested mildly, to no purpose.

A great crowd of the congregation had come down to the train with him, and he left them waving faithfully in a cold September rain. Kate was as grave as if she had watched Moses going off up to the mountains. Even the children did not scream.

The burden of his responsibility had come suddenly to weigh heavy on Arnold. There had been a horrible moment of doubt and clarity — a fear that he was going only to escape from the daily sight of things he could not change, that he would come back only a selfish old man who had eased his rheumatism in Palestine’s hot sun, while his people scrabbled along as best they could in faith of his divine return.

But the moment had passed, and in its place arose a firm conviction, unchangeable as stone, star-fixed, that God would speak to him there, give him some message, some iron retort to scoffers, some affirmation to the poor doubting ones who cried, ‘Where is God now?’ — and he felt that he would never more be shaken.

He was tired now from all the hours of travel, and the months of waiting that had gone before, but the great faith and purpose were untroubled. With his exaltation had come an excited feeling of adventure, of being on life’s threshold instead of going out its old back door.

He put his feet up on the suitcase and went to sleep, dreaming he brought Kate a waist dyed with pomegranate stain, and the buttons were white crosses sewed on by angels of the Lord.

VI

They were kind to him at the Courier office. All his money was returned, and they offered to see him on the train, would even have paid for his berth back home. Said they were sorry he had come so far, and had n’t realized it was a trip for white subscribers only. Hoped he would understand how delicate their situation was. . . .

They wondered about him sometimes afterward. He had slipped out pretty fast after they told him about the trip, and nobody had had time to trace him. They wondered where he had gone, and what he meant when he said he could never go back home again.