this day was never-ceasing. After that first afternoon, he had no more spoke to me than to Mrs. Pendrake in my hearing.
“I do not want you to have the misapprehension,” he finally said, “that we here see life as all duty. Therefore tomorrow, which is Saturday, and if Mrs. Pendrake does not require you and if you are favorably disposed to the project, I should be willing to take you fishing.”
Now, it being November of the year and while not winter as yet the weather was cold and damp and not the time any sane person would have fished for sport, I lost no time in accepting the invite. Add to the other reasons against so doing that I really couldn’t stand the Reverend except when he was eating, and you won’t understand why I did until I say that if he seemed to be in his wife’s debt, I had just now got to feeling in his.
So there we was, out to the creek next day in fairly miserable weather where the air was like a big sponge full of water and no sooner had we reached the stream when someone squeezed it and rain begun to pour down. We had come out in a buckboard, with Lavender driving and only he had sense enough to bring protection against the inclemency, for he had a big toe that was infallible as a weather gauge.
I could see right off that the Reverend didn’t know anything about fishing from the way he put a doughball on the hook-that was what we used, for Lavender claimed he couldn’t find worms in late November. And the day was sufficiently unpleasant to drive off a fellow who was crazy for the sport. But Pendrake had said he was going fishing, and that’s what he fixed to do, the water swirling around his hatbrim and running off his black coat. He was dressed in his usual, by the way, with no provision for leisure.
Lavender offered us his umbrella in insincere fashion, for which I didn’t blame him, but Pendrake said no, he didn’t require it, so Lavender kept it over himself and put a blanket underneath a tree and set there and looked at an illustrated paper someone had give him though he couldn’t read, but seemed to get more out of it than those who could, for he was laughing at it.
Me and the Reverend went down to the bank a ways along by some willows which was now brown and he says: “What’s your opinion of this location, boy?”
“It’s as good as any,” says I. My hair was all matted from the rain and water coursed down my cheeks; it seemed ridiculous in view of what we was supposed to be doing to have a good time, but I never minded the soaking as such, having been wetted down plenty as an Indian inside as well as outside the lodge, for tepee skins generally leak after they been in use for a while, especially at the seams.
But here he looked at me out of that black beard and said with genuine feeling, for which his voice was less ponderous: “Ah, boy, you’re getting wet.” With that he drew a big handkerchief and wiped my face right gently.
I guess I can’t explain it, but that was one of the truly kindest things anybody’s done for me, ever. It didn’t matter none that I wasn’t distressed or that his sudden discovery of the rain after it poured some minutes might have been foolish. He put his big hand on my damp shoulder and looked sorry out of all proportion. I hadn’t seen him straight ever before. His eyes was hazel and didn’t have too much of a lid. Without the beard he would have looked to lose much of his force, though he surely had enormous strength of muscle.
“We don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” he said. “We can go on back. It was an unfortunate idea.” He shook his head like a buffalo bull and droplets flung off the beard and he turned away and stared at the muddy creek, and says: “He sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”
“Who?” asks I, for I didn’t know.
“Why, our Heavenly Father, boy,” says Pendrake and, closing up grim again, throws his line in the water, which was so disturbed by the pelting rain that the bobber was dancing all the time and you would never tell from it if you caught a whale.
The Indians has always fished with a spear, which is to me a more interesting endeavor than hook and line. Also the rain was now getting to me: I had softened up in only a month or so. However, I didn’t want to hurt the Reverend’s feelings, so I presented him a bright suggestion.
Acting on it, he had Lavender run the wagon down on the bank, which was wide enough and flat for such accommodation, unhitch the horse and take him back under the tree, and we crawled beneath the buckboard, letting our fishpoles stick out, and thus had a roof against the elements.
Any fool could have figured this out, but the Reverend was greatly impressed by what he called my “acumen.” He seemed relieved that I was no longer getting soaked. As to himself, it was more complicated: you see, his trouble was he couldn’t allow himself any pleasure aside from eating. He would have preferred to be dripping and uncomfortable-that’s the only reason I could dream up as to why we come in the open wagon at all rather than the closed buggy which he also owned. I never could study out why Lavender was there, except that maybe the Reverend was uneasy with me by himself.
It was a tight squeeze for a man of his bulk underneath the buckboard. We set there a time smelling of wet wool, during which the current intermingled our lines and swept them useless into the bank and no doubt soon melted off the doughballs.
At length Pendrake said: “Boy, from what you asked before about the rain, I understand my delinquency.” He was cramped in there with his beard against his rising belly and looking on to the stream through the sheet of water coming from above.
“I have left you to live in the ignorance of an animal, though I have been specifically charged with leading men to a knowledge of God. Yesterday,” he goes on, “it came to my attention that you are swiftly approaching the province of adulthood, that soon the boy will be the man.”
For a minute I was scared he seen me on his wife’s bosom and misinterpreted that event.
“Mrs. Pendrake,” he began, and I gathered my legs under me in case I had to run for it, “Mrs. Pendrake, being a woman, is altogether innocent of these matters. She was not a party to a lie. Looking at you through the eyes of a mother, she saw no blemish in the boy she knows, and that is a credit to her.
“But I am a man, and as such, no stranger to impurity. I myself passed through the years in which you find yourself. I know the Devil, boy, I have shaken him by the hand, I have embraced him and smelled his stinking breath and thought it the finest perfume.”
He got himself exercised with these remarks and pressed his head against the buckboard floor, squashing his black hat, while the wagon lifted several inches out of the mud.
Then he eased and spoke gentle. “I heard that colloquy through my study door. I am aware that you had the knife, boy, and I can imagine only too well your motive for using it against another.… The girl’s identity is of no interest to me. I am willing to believe that although you were doing the Devil’s work you did not recognize him in his female attire. Does she have velvet cheeks, boy, and satin hair and long-lashed eyes undershot with damask? No matter, behind that mask is a skull of white bone with hollow sockets, and that soft pink mouth is the cave of death.”
I just flicked my line as if I had a bite, for whatever could I say to that? As to the girls I had been thrown with so far, they was ten years old in that school class.
“I don’t condemn you, boy,” Pendrake said. “I tell you I know the fire that rises in the loins and sweeps upward consuming all before it. I know the primitive peoples among whom you spent your boyhood make a sacred thing of this conflagration. But that is our difference, is it not? that we harness our bestial energies. That we do not defile but preserve. Woman is a vessel, and it is within man’s power to make that vessel a golden chalice or a slop bucket.”
Along about here, Lavender come down to the bank under his umbrella and toting an enormous basket covered with oilcloth. He scrooched down and peeked at us under the wagon.
When talking to the Reverend he assumed a lazy, whiny, idiotic style that I happened to know he reserved for just that purpose, for he was otherwise very sharp though illiterate as I said.
“Your Honor,” says he, “would … you all … be wantin’ … thisheer lunch?”
“Put it down, that’s a good fellow,” answers Pendrake in a clipped way that he probably figured would stimulate Lavender to move faster but seemed to have the reverse effect.
When Lavender finally trudged away, Pendrake said: “There is a case in point. Can you understand that Lavender and Lucy would have lived in common, defying the ordinances of God and man, had I not insisted on marrying them?”
I might say at this point and then we won’t mention it again, that I do not know whether Pendrake was Abolitionist or Proslavery. He had freed Lavender, if that meant anything. And if he was Abolitionist, why his reason would have been that freedom would make the colored people less lusty. Now I know you can read in history
