The Revival

A STORY

by DILLON ANDERSON

IT WOULD not be right if I did not make it clear in the beginning that the trip to Texas was Claudie’s idea. He had spoken often and fondly of an uncle of his who had run off to Texas, where he had become quite involved and prominent in religion and politics.Claudie was so strong for going to Texas that he did not always bear in mind that this same uncle had also got himself killed while in that state. At any rate, Claudie was naturally pleased when I decided that we would go, and I might say that I was too, though we had no idea as to what particular thing we would do when we got to Texas. In those days I was specializing, you might say, in other people’s business; and there was hardly anything that I could not do or have Claudie do.

We crossed the Louisiana border and drove several miles into Texas before we saw anything but pine trees and red clay. The white house by the sawmill was the first one we saw after we crossed the border; it was a fine, big house with a broad veranda. As we made our way up the little grade leading to the house, our old Ford was heaving and steaming like a worn-out teakettle. We had to have water.

At the big house I got out and went in, as I always have to do since Claudie has no approach for strangers. I won over the brindle dogs that came out, barking and growling, from behind the crape myrtle bushes by the front gate. Then I and the dogs went up to the wide veranda of the big house where a fat man was sitting in a wicker rocker, fanning himself in the heat and looking mighty worried.

“Stranger,” I said, “I need some water for my car, and my man out there is thirsty. My name is Hightower; what’s yours?”

“Ball, and there’s the well.” He never looked toward me but once. He called the dogs, and they tucked their tails between their legs and slunk under the house.

“Pretty warm,” I told him, as I drew the water; but his only answer was to take the handkerchief from around the back of his collar and wipe his forehead with it. I noticed he was pulling away at a cob pipe too fast and too hard to be enjoying it.

I drew the water, filled the radiator, and gave Claudie a drink, all the time watching Mr. Ball out of the corner of my eye. He never looked my way again until I went, back to the veranda to return the bucket and see what was bothering him. By that time I knew that he needed help. Whatever it was, I knew I could do it — or have Claudie do it. I put the bucket back on the well casing, made the well rope up into a nice smooth, even coil; then I went over to where Mr. Ball was sitting.

“That’s a mighty nice bunch of dogs you’ve got there, Mr. Ball — mighty nice,” I said.

“I like ‘em pretty fair,” he replied; but I could see his heart was not in it. Still, he was getting a lot friendlier for a person who was paying me almost no mind at all.

About this time the gate hinge gave its complaining whine. A great big rawboned young man came through and strode up the walk between the crape myrtle bushes. He was wearing boots, a big, shining sheriff’s star, and two pistols. One of his pistols was pearl-handled. Beyond the gates and alongside our Ford was the sheriff’s car, and in the front seat there was a bareheaded blonde. Her hair was the color of corn silk. Claudie was sitting in the Ford and looking straight at her. And she was looking the other way. Something familiar about the way she looks, I thought. It was vague, but it was there.

“Come in, Sid,” Mr. Ball called out to the sheriff. “Come up and have this extra chair.”

The sheriff said, “Howdy, Mr. Ball,” and sat down. Nobody said anything to me, so I went to the well and drew another bucket of water. Then I sat at the far end of the veranda and listened.

“They’ve been stealin’ more growin’ timber than ever before this summer, Sid,” Mr. Ball was saying.

“I know it, Mr. Ball,” the sheriff said. “There ain’t even enough dogwood left in the forest to interest the Garden Club ladies. All of our dogwood is going to Europe as axehandles.”

“The thieves cut several thousand feet of white oak this past month for barrel staves and sold it in Beaumont, too,” Mr. Ball went on, “and now they are cutting some pine and burning the stumps so the evidence will be gone. Can’t you do anything?”

“Hit’s mighty, mighty hard to get a conviction any more since the Legislature made timber stealin’ a felony, Mr. Ball. You know, we used to keep old Hooks Butler in jail about half the time when it was a misdemeanor. Juries will send a man to jail for thirty days for timber stealin’, but it hain’t serious enough a crime to send a man to the penitentiary; they just won’t do it.”

Mr. Ball looked glum for a while; then his face began to get redder and redder. “Sid Cotton,”he said to the sheriff, “I spent a thousand dollars to get that law passed. I knew that Hooks Butler and his sorry kin were causing all the trouble, and I thought we could keep them all in jail for a long time. I pay you fifty dollars a month and get you deputized, and still things get worse and worse. If you don’t go do something to stop that stealin’, I’m going to fire you. Good-bye!”

The sheriff left. He and the bareheaded blonde were driving off in front of a cloud of red dust when Mr. Ball turned around my way and said, “You still here?”

That’s when I made my move. “Mr. Ball,” I said, looking him straight in the eye, “what you need is a first-class evangelist. Yes, sir,” I said, taking the chair the sheriff had vacated, “this Butler and his relatives need an old-time, knockdown, drag-out revival; they need to be ‘saved.’”

I’ll bet Mr. Ball hadn’t looked any better in weeks than he did when this idea started to percolate. He just sat there and looked at a swarm of gnats by the cistern until his face brightened up like a coal oil lantern when the wick is high. Then he turned to me and said, “What faith is hardest on stealin’?”

“The Apostolic,” I told him.

“You see, Mr. Ball,” I went on, “fortune and a kindly fate have brought me here. I go about, just helping people. I can cure this stealing.”

“You might be right. . . . What did you say your name was?”

“Hightower, Reverend Clint C. Hightower,” I said, speaking from a point far down below my collarbone.

“You mean you are a preacher?”

“ I am, sir,” I said, standing and folding my hands firmly behind my back end. “When do I start?”

We haggled over the price for an hour. I reminded him how much money he had spent for no results, and he argued that he did not know how much better I could do than the sheriff had done. We finally settled on a two weeks’ revival at the old Turkey Trot tabernacle, right down in the middle of the whole nest of Butlers. He let it out that there had not been a revival down there in eleven years, so I got the price up a little more to pay for the backsliding I would have to undo. He agreed to pay me a hundred dollars a week for the work, tn addition to the collection plate, and a bonus of a hundred dollars if we could convert old Hooks Butler himself. Claudie was to do the singing, which I had agreed would be bass or better. Then it took me the last hour to talk the old devil into a twenty-five dollars advance.

I and Claudie drove to Beaumont that night. It was about dark when we found a nice beer and domino parlor where the people seemed very friendly to us.

“Claudie,” I said, after a beer or so, “Mr. Ball needs us awful bad up there.”

“How?”

“His community is steeped in sin.”

Claudie put his glass down and looked at me like an old pig looks at a new gate.

“ Clint,” he said, “ I won’t do it. We have put out all kinds of help in this world. We have bought votes in Georgia to help a good man get elected constable, and then we imposed on him something awful. We have promoted two county fairs, and we broke a waiters’ strike to help the cafée man that was going broke. We gave swimming lessons in Birmingham, until you fell in the pool and almost drowned. We were piano tuners in Savannah that time to help those ladies explain to their husbands what we were doing in the parlor. We were eyewitnesses to an accident we didn’t see to help an old peddler collect the damages the streetcar company owed him; but when it comes to sin, I draw the line.”

I finally got him stopped and explained to him that we were not going to promote any sin; we were going to stop one of the worst sins of all: stealing. Claudie didn’t like the idea of singing in a revival at first, but he agreed to it when I told him I would give him a full half of all the collections. Naturally, I didn’t mention Mr. Ball’s bonus. Claudie was suspicious at first about getting this full-half cut of the collection plate. You don’t have to be smart to be suspicious, you know. But I told Claudie the beer had just made me overly generous, and I agreed to handle all the preaching.

“You can still sing, can’t you, Claudie?” I asked. Claudie answered by singing a few bars of a song he had learned in the wrong part of El Reno, Oklahoma.

2

WE SPENT the week and most of the twenty-live dollars in Beaumont. We had a fine time. I got a Gideon Bible and a black frock coat for myself and bought Claudie a haircut. Then we went to the Turkey Trot job.

Our revival got away to a mighty slow start. In fact, it was nearly left at the post when the weather faired off three days before the services began and the catfish got to biting at night on Big Caney Creek, which runs right through the Turkey Trot neighborhood. We didn’t have enough congregation that first Sunday night to make a ring in a boardinghouse bathtub. There were a few of the womenfolks, sitting here and there and fanning themselves with palm-leaf fans, while the children fussed or slept under the pews. All but three of the men stayed outside the tabernacle; they stood around in little groups smoking and talking in low tones. None of Hooks Butler’s tribe was there.

The next day it rained a gully washer, and the creek got up half-bank full and too muddy for even catfishing. There was a good deal of lightning and thunder — sharp, gashy streaks of zigzag flashes and rough, rumbling thunder, clapping close up and bouncing away over the piney hills until it played out in a threatening mutter far away.

There is nothing like an electrical storm to help a revival meeting. We had a fine attendance the next night, with the tabernacle over half filled, nearly all the men inside, and three Butlers in the congregation — but not old Hooks.

Sid Cotton, the sheriff, was there with his wife; she was certainly a beautiful thing, with big, blue eyes and peachy complexion. There was something about her high forehead that seemed almost familiar, like a picture that just fills the molds of your fancy and so gives you a feeling of dim recognition.

The singing was better than I had hoped for. Claudie stood up there, with his hair parted way over on one side and his shoes laced all the way up, and sang loud and sweet. You know, there is something about good, loud, full-voiced country singing of religious songs, such as “Rock of Ages” and “Faith of Our Fathers,” that makes feelings rise up in you like yeast in a churn by the fire, and sends tingles out to the ends of your fingers. We were getting somewhere.

It must have been Wednesday or Thursday of the first week that we had our first flurry of trouble. About nine o’clock or ten in the morning, I was on my way to the tabernacle when I met that lovely blonde, the sheriff’s wife. I stopped, and she stopped, and we looked at each other for a moment or so before either of us spoke.

“Sister Cotton,” I said, not wishing to lose any more time, “what’s your first name?”

“Elaine.” She almost smiled as she said it.

“Elaine,” I said, “you look so beautiful to me that it is almost like recognizing a fond old dream of beauty.”

Then Elaine’s smile froze fast, and she said, “You ought to recognize me, Mr. Hightower; you sold my father a lightning rod in Fayette, Mississippi, nearly two years ago. You got his money, but the lightning rod never came. I was the oldest daughter, and you made a pass at me only ten minutes after you came to our house.”

“Oh, Claudie!” I yelled. laudie was in the car. “Come here, quick.”

Claudie came quick, and said, “How d’ya do, Sister Cotton.”

She said, “How d’ya do.” It was frigid.

“Claudie,”I went on, “don’t you remember Sister Cotton? Her father’s lightning rod order is the one you lost over in Mississippi. Remember?”

Claudie just looked dumb and said, “Did I?” Sometimes I could kill him.

“Of course you did. I have worried about it all this time. Now we can clear everything up. Elaine,” I turned and said to her with dignity, “please hand me your father’s address, and I will send him the lightning rod. It’s in New Orleans now, ready to be shipped.”

“You can’t,” she said, looking me square in the eyes and not batting hers at all. “He’s dead. He was struck by lightning.”

Elaine turned and walked slowly away. But she looked back once as she left.

Claudie wanted to leave Texas right then. He said he had had enough. We went over to the blacksmith’s house where we were boarding and started to pack our clothes. Right in the middle of it, I quit. “Claudie,” I said, “I know women pretty well. If she just suspected us, she’d tell on us, and they would tar and feather us both and ride us out of here on a rail. But she’s got us dead to rights, and she knows it. I’m going to stay. I’ll bet she doesn’t squeal on us.”

I must have sounded a lot surer about this thing than I really was because Claudie said, “You’re betting a lot,” but he started unpacking. Claudie thinks I’m smarter than I really am about such things; he was unpacked before I was.

That night at the services, Sid Cotton, wearing his sheriff’s star, and the lovely Elaine sat in the front row. It was plain that she had said nothing to anyone, and I want to put it down right here and now that she looked to me like the quintessence of distilled sweetness. She might have been just the farmer’s daughter a few years before, and a bareheaded blonde a few days ago, and a neighbor’s wife to covet until that morning, but she was the angel Elaine to me that evening. I wanted to go out and fight a dozen wildcats with my bare hands, just to keep her from having to hear their ugly mewing. I couldn’t have preached a sermon if hell had been next door, so we sang an extra number of songs and gave over the rest of the time to calling on members of the congregation to volunteer and testify about what the Lord had done for them. It sounded like a liquid asset to hear those old nesters get up and talk right out in a crowd like that about the Lord’s blessings. I knew that timber stealing would not mix with this sort of thing.

One of the Butlers had had running sores all one spring, and had been cured by faith. One dear old lady had had fits, and fever, for “nigh onto a year.” She was cured. Next, her husband got up to testify after she had nudged him. He had had the liquor taste, and when he got delirium tremens, the Old Scratch used to come and poke him in the rear with a pitchfork. He couldn’t get. rid of the habit or the Old Scratch until he joined the church. Right after that, five shouts he had lost had come back. The schoolmarm got up and cried and said that once when she was in Chicago in summer school, she had gone astray with a man who ran a billiard hall. She was pretty complete about it, and she went so much into detail that I was afraid for a while that she was not making anyone want to go to heaven; she was simply making people want to go to Chicago. She vowed and declared that after she joined the church, she had not been astray a single time. What a pity, I thought; and then I thought again, Why, Clint, you damned, dirty, hypocritical dog, you do this for money that will only get you drunk and in trouble, and these people believe you.

But I had to get on. I had taught Claudie a little speech and rehearsed him in it. This seemed to be a good time for it.

“Dearly beloveds,” I said, “my colleague, Brother Claudie Hughes, has not related to you his experience with the clutches of sin. He is modest, but I think he should tell you of the long, thorny path he followed back to grace. Once he was steeped in sin.” I turned and pointed to Claudie, and the drama of it all was feeling its way right up my spine and out through the end of my pointing finger, Claudie looked a little startled.

“Brother Claudie was once a common thief,” I told them. I shuddered, and Claudie shuddered, and people in the congregation all shuddered and looked at each other. I looked at all the Butlers there, and they shuddered too.

“Yes,” I said, “a common thief. The blackest sin in the catalogue. Taking that which belonged to others, and depriving them of it against the peace and dignity of the state. Tell them, Claudie,”I said, “tell them all about what happened to your awful stealing ways when you gave your heart to God.”

“I quit,”Claudie said. Then he looked at me, forgot the rest, and sat down.

“ Let us pray,” I said.

Saturday night after the meeting broke up, I and Claudie counted up the first week’s collection and divided it fifty-fifty, just as we had agreed. It amounted to $18.80 each. After Claudie went to bed, I drove up to Mr. Ball’s house, collected my hundred dollars for the first week, and asked Mr. Ball what effect the revival was having on the t imber stealing.

“It’s dried up down around Turkey Trot,” he said, “but there is trouble up north of here a few miles.”

“Too had,”I said, thinking all the time about making this thing into a full summer job.

” Yes,”he said, I just sent Sheriff Sid Cotton up there to lay out in the woods all night for ‘em and try to catch one red-handed.”

“I see,”I said; then I said, “Good night, Mr. Ball.”

3

IT WAS around ten o’clock, or maybe a little later, when I got to the Cotton house, but Elaine was still awake. Somehow she wasn’t surprised, and she came out, and we talked in the old Ford. It was a prime summer night with a sly sliver of a new moon lying back of the pine trees and just a few soft, summery clouds like uneven bolls of open cotton floating by on the south wind. Somewhere in the distance a mockingbird sang in the night, and I said to Elaine, “Nobody but God could set up a night like this.” Elaine just sat there and looked hurt. After a while I went on, “Elaine, do you mind if I call you Elaine?”

“No,” she replied, softly, but I knew something was eating on her inside.

“Elaine,”I said, “how would you value the love of an honest man?”

Elaine looked at me for a moment or so, with a speck of a kindly gleam in her eye, and then she said, “An honest man? What difference could that possibly make to you? What were you doing up at Mr. Ball’s tonight?”

“Why, I wasn’t—” I started, and then I knew that she knew how I found out that Sid was away and was not coming back that night. I knew, too, that I’d have to do some tall talking before she figured the rest of it out. Then, somehow, I knew at once that there wasn’t any use; that wouldn’t do. So I said, “Elaine, there’s no use pretending to you. You know I’m not good. I’m bogus. I’ll leave. Thanks for keeping mum about me and Claudie. You’re the finest woman I ever saw, and I love you. Good-bye.”

By this time I was hanging my head and feeling much worse than a sheep-killing dog looks. Usually, when I look down, and then look up, I have a pretty good idea of what I’ll see, but this time I was dead wrong. When I looked up, there was Elaine putting her arms around me and a tear was glistening on her cheek.

You can take all the fresh sweetness of the new green buds in the springtime, and the quiet blue peace of twilight in the woods in winter; you can take the relief that it is to drink cold buttermilk of a hot summer evening when you’re tired, and the rising beauty that hums and buzzes in you when you hear sung the old songs you heard in childhood. You can roll all these into one and smother it in the fragrance kissed from a million hyacinths, and that’s the way I felt that moment with Elaine in my arms. I kissed her and held her and my heart went sailing up into my throat in much the same way that a tightrope walker in pink silk tights is lifted to the top of the circus tent while the drums roll. Then Elaine pulled away and ran inside.

4

THE next day was Sunday, and I preached a stemwinding sermon to them that made the woods ring. Elaine was in the front row.

Hooks Butler was there for the first time. He came in late and sat way back, but I knew who he was before anybody told me. He was one-eyed, and he carried his head a little to one side so that it gave him the look of alert slyness you see in certain dumb animals. His face had a sharp, thin hardness about it that you could almost chop wood with. He never took part in the singing.

I suddenly decided on a double feature, two texts and all. “Be sure your sins will find you out" and “Thou shall not steal.” It seemed only fair to give Mr. Ball his money’s worth.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later I finished with the best description I could give them of the sharp, crackly tongues of hell-fire, blazing blue and licking away at a bunch of thieves and Judas Iscariot. I was in a lather. There was a fair sprinkling of “Amens” in the congregation, and Claudie led the singing off, while I panted and shooed the gnats away. As we sang, I could see by the lights of the gasoline torches that there were tears on the cheeks of some of the ladies. Then I looked at Elaine, and right away I wanted her bad. The thing that happens in songs and storybooks had clearly happened to me—but she was married to the sheriff. Then I looked at old Hooks Butler. Clint, I said to myself, get yourself together and extend the invitation to that old son-of-a-bitch out there. There’s a hundred dollars in it. I let them have it with all the stops out, and eight more people joined up, bringing the total to seventeen. Two were Butlers, but not Hooks.

After they were all gone that night, I and Claudie sat in the front pew and talked awhile. Claudie said he’d heard me act as barker for fat ladies and fireeaters in side shows; he had heard me argue politics in Tennessee; he said he had heard me talk my way out of a vagrancy rap in Mobile; but he never before heard anything so good as my sermon that night. I told him his singing was first-rate, and think I must have meant it, too.

“Clint,” he said, “you know what I almost did tonight ?”

“No, Claudie,” I said, “what?”

“Well,” he said, “I almost got converted; I almost hit the sawdust trail.”

“You fool,” I said. “You dope, that would have ruined everything!” But I thought about what Claudie had said until I went to sleep.

The next week the weather was fair and clear again, and the creek cleared up, but the people kept coming to the revival anyhow. Hooks Butler never missed another meeting. Tuesday night he came up to the rostrum after the services, but I could see he wouldn’t have done so if he hadn’t been convoyed up by his old lady. She told me how much good they had got out of my sermon on “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Hooks just fidgeted and shook hands and hurried away, looking down.

The following morning, I and Claudie were working on the foot organ that had sprung a leak somewhere when I saw Elaine coming toward the tabernacle. She held her head high and her walk was quick and firm, so I could see that she was making no ordinary call.

“Go ahead, Claudie,” I told him. “I’m going out to speak to Sister Cotton.”

“Clint,”she said, in an agitated, trembly voice, “somebody saw us Saturday night.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Old Granny Strickland. She lives about a mile down the road, and she was out looking for her cat.”

“Did she tell anybody, Elaine?”

“She told Sid this morning, but I told him she was crazy. She has spells, anyhow, and Sid ain’t sure yet. I knew I’d better find you before Sid did.”

“Elaine,” I told her, and I meant it, “you and I had better get in that Ford and see how quick we can get how far. I love you, and you know it, and I’ll look after you forever. There’s going to be trouble here, and I’ll take you somewhere where nothing can trouble us because we will be together.”

She looked at me for a long time, and I saw what I wanted to see in her eyes; then she said, “No, Clint, it wouldn’t be right.”

5

SATURDAY night was the last night, and up to that time we had a total of fifty-four dollars and twentynine converts. All we needed to shoot the moon was Hooks Butler, and he was on hand early. Mr. Ball came and sat way over at the right, a little removed from the others. Sid and Elaine came later and sat over by him.

Claudie led them in the songs we had selected for the way our customers had sung them before. My text was one I had saved for this last chance — my last chance with Hooks, and Hooks’s last chance with God. It was “The wages of sin is death.” Before I started I thought, Hooks, you damned old thief, tonight you’re my meat.

I began by telling them how God and man despised the hypocrite who would sit in church on Sunday and steal during the week. I told them how sin and hypocrisy ate away at the soul, as the boll weevil eats the cotton boll. I gave them some Beatitudes I had learned from my grandmother, the Twenty-third Psalm, and a whole passel of proverbs. I worked in a passage or two that I’d once memorized from Black Beauty and then some of the things Little Eva said before she passed out in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The words crowded and flowed like a spring branch after a quick shower when I told them about the awful death of the spirit that is steeped in sin and hypocrisy. I told them stealing was the worst of all, and then I asked all sinners to come and repent and be saved. Claudie took then to singing “Almost Persuaded,”and Hooks Butler pulled out from his pew and started down the aisle.

“There comes one hundred dollars,” I said to myself, and looked at Mr. Ball, who was looking at Hooks. When Hooks came up to shake my hand, the tears were streaming down his face — even from his bad eye. Someone shouted, and the others took it up, and then the music stopped. Seeing Hooks Butler converted was no mere incident in the Turkey Trot community. You wouldn’t do it right by calling it an event. It was an epoch.

“Brother Hightower,” he said to me, “you are a man of God. I want to be like you.” Then he cried some more, and scratched himself about the back of the neck; then he sat down on the mourners’ bench with his head in his hands.

I had no words to reply to Hooks Butler. After a bit, things quieted down, and I wanted to say something, but still I could not for the life of me. So I looked at Claudie, and he started singing, in soft and mellow tones, “Shall We Gather at the River?" The others joined, and the piney woods around the tabernacle were all in tune with the singing.

When the song was ended, Mr. Ball got up and told how proud he was that the revival was such a big success. Then he turned to the congregation and said that the tabernacle looked pretty old and wornout to him. He said he certainly would like to see a new one built. There was a lot of solemn nodding.

“Well,” Mr. Ball went on, “it can be done for six hundred dollars, and I will give half of it. I am ready to write my check for three hundred dollars.”

There was a lot of whispering, and a quickening in the rhythm of the palm-leaf fans as the shouting mood came over the congregation.

As soon as the shouting died away, Hooks Butler rose to his feet and said, “I’ll give a hundred dollars,” and with this Granny Strickland fainted dead away. We took up a collection that produced about a hundred more. Then I realized that the Hooks Butler bonus Mr. Ball owed me would put us over the top.

“Peace,” I said, “dearly beloveds, we only need a hundred more, and that is the amount of my contribution.” This really created a stir. Someone started singing “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” I looked at Elaine, and her eyes were shining; in her look nothing was held back, nothing was concealed.

Claudie was stunned. He came over to the pulpit and whispered, “Where in the hell are you going to get a hundred dollars?”

“Claudie,” I replied, “trust in me and trust in God.” He resumed his singing.

There was a heap of rejoicing and handshaking and everybody loved the Lord and everybody else that night as the meeting broke up. It was a good, sweet, weepy occasion all around; and everybody was very happy.

Among the last, Elaine came up to the rostrum to tell me good-bye. When she shook my hand, she left a note in it. The first chance I got, I went over to one side and read it. It was short: —

I’ll go with you — anywhere. Be here at the tabernacle at daylight tomorrow if you want me.

Clint, I said to myself as I reread the note, you never did believe all of that Bible story about Joseph in Egypt. Remember how you choked on that part about Joseph when he was made a pass at by Potiphar’s wife? Well, here is one that is happening to you in Texas, Clint, and something tells me you are not going to believe the way this one comes out either.

I and Claudie went back to our room, where we packed our things. We told the blacksmith and his wife good-bye and drove down to the New Orleans-Houston road. We rode along for an hour or more in the direction of New Orleans before I or Claudie said anything. Along about midnight Claudie said, “Clint, you are awful smart, but I think I might go back next week and help Pappy with the cotton crop.”

I did not answer right off. We got a tankful of gasoline at a filling station in Lake Charles; and while Claudie checked the air in the tires, I reckoned by the road map that by daylight we could be in New Orleans — or we could be back at the tabernacle in the Turkey Trot community.

“Claudie,” I said, “drive us on to New Orleans tonight, will vou? Close the cutout and don’t go too fast; I want to meditate.”