“So you just preach to white folks when you take your rides, make your circle?”
“It wasn’t always that way, mind you,” he explained, relighting his pipe with the burning twig as the night became all the deeper around them. “As a young man I first received the gift of tongues. I gave powerful sermons in the great cities of the east, dined in the finest of homes, held people in the palm of my hand by the thousands. Then one night at a camp meeting outside Philadelphia, I saw her.”
“Her?”
His eyelids fell contritely. “The woman who was to be my downfall.”
“Woman?”
“She sat in the second row,” he replied, looking off into the distance. “Once my eyes touched her, I could not take them off her beauty. No, not that she was the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen—for there had been others prettier. But there was something so altogether striking, appealing … seductive about her. With the way she stirred my carnal appetites—why, I knew immediately, there and then, that she was the devil himself come to tempt me.”
“The devil himself?” Titus asked in growing wonder, then swallowed, forgetting all about his pipe as he was completely drawn into the story.
“I spent the rest of the night preaching only to her. Forget the thousands who had flocked to hear my words that evening. Forget them all! I preached only to her. And in the end my faith was not enough. When the night was done and morning came through the windows of that grand hotel room, I awoke to find myself lying in bed beside that creature of temptation. I had succumbed. I had sinned. I had fallen as Adam fell—tempted by the devil made incarnate.”
“You … you had you … you diddled with that woman?”
The stranger nodded, gazing now into the fire. “I suppose I could have gone on preaching in those eastern cities—but in my heart I felt the ruin. My safe, secure life of preaching to the wealthy and numerous along the Atlantic seaboard was over. I disappeared over the mountains, wandered down the Ohio, on down the Tennessee River, finding my way into the Cumberland as if guided by some unseen hand. Now I do what I have always done since leaving that rich, prosperous life behind: I ride and preach. Many a morning do I arise early to prepare myself to speak to a small congregation in some faraway place in the forest.”
“How you find them?”
The old man smiled. “God takes me to them, to all those who are in need, don’t you see? So I go among them, a new community nearly every day or so. Arising from my blankets before the sun and preparing my sermon. Sometimes there is a handful to listen to the word. Other times there may be fifteen or so. Faith is spread mighty thin in the wilderness, young man. Mighty thin indeed.”
“But no matter,” Titus commented. “You preach to ’em all, like God wants you to.”
“As God
“And so you ride on to another place?”
“Yes, I do that. I go on, at first I am weak and limp as this frostbitten grass—my power sapped by the wayward sheep. Yet, I trust in God. On I ride to my next flock, gathering my strength all the while, renewing my vigor in the Lord—for God will provide.”
Titus gazed at the fire, the corn husks and chicken bones heaped beside the coals.
“Never should you doubt it, young man. The Almighty will provide.”
“And He will provide for you, my son,” the old preacher repeated the next morning after they had arisen, saddled, and were preparing to separate.
“I don’t know that I ever asked nothing of the Lord. Never been much of a one to pray.”
With that hard-boned and angular face of his, the stranger replied, “You yourself told me last night that for a long time you’ve been praying to get to St. Louie.”
“Maybe you misunderstood me. I ain’t never
“But you’ve hoped, and dreamed, and done all that you could to get there.”
“And I am getting there on my own.”
A smile wrinkled the lined face. “You’re getting there because God is answering your prayer.”
Titus felt uneasy of a sudden, on unfamiliar ground. Frightened that he might just be in the presence of something far, far bigger than himself. “I don’t know nothing about that, sir…. What is your name anyway?”
Removing his old felt hat from his head and dipping in a little bow, he answered, “Garrity Tremble is the name.” He slapped the hat on his head and presented a hand to Titus. “Who have I had the honor of meeting and sharing so much conversation with?”
“Titus Bass.”
He tugged the hat down on his brow, saying, “Well, Titus Bass. I will be looking forward to seeing you again in St. Louis in something on the order of a month. Perhaps we can talk again about prayer at that time, for I must be on my way now. There are the faithful and the faithless who beckon me into the wilderness.” He swung into that old saddle atop that fine, blooded horse. “Many times have I prayed God to remove this burdensome yoke from my shoulders … but He will not. I certainly hope that what you pray for, Titus Bass—will not become a yoke locked about your shoulders.”
In bewildered silence he watched Tremble turn the big animal away and move off into the cold, frosty stillness of the forest. Before he climbed atop the old plowhorse, Titus cautiously placed a hand upon one shoulder, as if to feel for any invisible weight there. Then touched the other shoulder in the same way. Still not satisfied, he shook his shoulders as if to rock loose anything perchance resting there. And decided it was all a little ghosty and superstitious of him to believe any preacher knew what he was talking about.
To think of it! Him, praying! Why, Titus knew he’d never prayed a prayer one in his entire life—leastways ever since he’d stopped going to church hand in hand with his mam.
Folks must just get crazy with their praying and all that talk of God and such, he decided as he urged the plodding horse into a walk. Any man who gave up everything for a woman, then gave her up and counted on God to provide everything for him from then on out had to be a fool. If not a fool, then perhaps downright touched.
A man had to provide for himself.
Just as he always had, Titus figured.
Anything else was nothing more than superstition.
He found work in St. Louis his first day.
Reporting to the crowded docks the following dawn, Titus stayed all morning long at the shoulder of the man who had hired him. There he quickly learned what was expected of him in his new position. Instead of toting the loads on and off the boats at the great riverside wharf, Bass was hired as a tallyman. To count the casks and kegs, bales and boxes, oak barrels and hemp coils coming off from boats struggling north against the current up to St. Louis, to count as well all the cargo going onto boats bound for points south.
“You can count?” the man had asked.
“Yes, sir. I can count,” he had answered, a bit confused by that sort of question when he had shown up to ask for stevedore work, ready to tell of his experience in Owensboro.
“Can you write your numbers?”
“Yes, sir. It’s been some time, but I figure I can—”
“Good. Come with me and see if you can catch on to what I’m doing before the dinner hour.”
By noon the job was his. Struggling to control the great and unruly sheets of foolscap he had to write upon, standing at the tall but tiny desk he was instructed to place at the bottom of the cleated gangplank that stretched from the dock to a boat’s gunnel. There he was given the wharfmaster’s authority to make sure nothing came off, nor went on, without his first making a count of it in the proper column, in the proper box, afterward to make a final tally for his boss of what was now lashed on board for shipping, or what had just arrived for storage in one of the many stone warehouses that lined the great and bustling wharf.
By the following spring he’d had himself enough of that mind-twisting work and went off in search of
