And then there wasn’t nothing but jest pap, drenched and groggy-looking, on the ground, with the rest of us around him, and Whitfield like always in his boiled shirt and his black hat and pants, standing there with his hat on, too, like he had strove too long to save what hadn’t ought to been created in the first place, from the damnation it didn’t even want to escape, to bother to need to take his hat off in any presence. He looked around at us from under it; we was all there now, all that belonged to that church and used it to be born and marry and die from — us and the Armstids and Tulls, and Bookwright and Quick and Snopes.
“I was wrong,” Whitfield said. “I told you we would meet here tomorrow to roof a church. We’ll meet here in the morning to raise one.”
“Of course we got to have a church,” pap said. “We’re going to have one. And we’re going to have it soon. But there’s some of us done already give a day or so this week, at the cost of our own work. Which is right and just, and we’re going to give more, and glad to. But I don’t believe that the Lord—”
Whitfield let him finish. He never moved. He jest stood there until pap finally run down of his own accord and hushed and set there on the ground mostly not looking at maw, before Whitfield opened his mouth.
“Not you,” Whitfield said. “Arsonist.”
“Arsonist?” pap said.
“Yes,” Whitfield said. “If there is any pursuit in which you can engage without carrying flood and fire and destruction and death behind you, do it. But not one hand shall you lay to this new house until you have proved to us that you are to be trusted again with the powers and capacities of a man.” He looked about at us again. “Tull and Snopes and Armstid have already promised for tomorrow. I understand that Quick had another half day he intended—”
“I can give another day,” Solon said.
“I can give the rest of the week,” Homer said.
“I ain’t rushed neither,” Snopes said.
“That will be enough to start with, then,” Whitfield said. “It’s late now. Let us all go home.”
He went first. He didn’t look back once, at the church or at us. He went to the old mare and clumb up slow and stiff and powerful, and was gone, and we went too, scattering. But I looked back at it. It was jest a shell now, with a red and fading core, and I had hated it at times and feared it at others, and I should have been glad. But there was something that even that fire hadn’t even touched.
Maybe that’s all it was — jest indestructibility, endurability — that old man that could plan to build it back while its walls was still fire-fierce and then calmly turn his back and go away because he knowed that the men that never had nothing to give toward the new one but their work would be there at sunup tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, too, as long as it was needed, to give that work to build it back again.
So it hadn’t gone a-tall; it didn’t no more care for that little fire and flood than Whitfield’s old baptizing gown had done. Then we was home. Maw had left so fast the lamp was still lit, and we could see pap now, still leaving a puddle where he stood, with a cut across the back of his head where the barrel had busted and the blood-streaked water soaking him to the waist.
“Get them wet clothes off,” maw said.
“I don’t know as I will or not,” pap said. “I been publicly notified that I ain’t fitten to associate with white folks, so I publicly notify them same white folks and Methodists, too, not to try to associate with me, or the devil can have the hindmost.”
But maw hadn’t even listened. When she come back with a pan of water and a towel and the liniment bottle, pap was already in his nightshirt.
“I don’t want none of that neither,” he said. “If my head wasn’t worth busting, it ain’t worth patching.” But she never paid no mind to that neither. She washed his head off and dried it and put the bandage on and went out again, and pap went and got into bed.
“Hand me my snuff; then you get out of here and stay out too,” he said.
But before I could do that maw come back. She had a glass of hot toddy, and she went to the bed and stood there with it, and pap turned his head and looked at it.
“What’s that?” he said.
But maw never answered, and then he set up in bed and drawed a long, shuddering breath — we could hear it — and after a minute he put out his hand for the toddy and set there holding it and drawing his breath, and then he taken a sip of it.
“I Godfrey, if him and all of them put together think they can keep me from working on my own church like ary other man, he better be a good man to try it.” He taken another sip of the toddy. Then he taken a long one. “Arsonist,” he said. “Work units. Dog units. And now arsonist. I Godfrey, what a day!”
The End
