“Oh, you’re a good enough hand to work. But Preacher, you mind your own play-pretties and we’ll mind our’n. That is, less’n you want to see your great-great-grandmammy real soon.” And once again Bird’s-Eye made as if to raise the gun to his shoulder.
There was a ripple of ribald laughter. Then every eye was on the tall young man on the hillside. Behind me the cabin door was full, the other women peering anxiously over my shoulders. Only Granny Barclay had elbowed her way into the yard and stood with her hands on her hips, as if for two cents, she would leap into the fray and start fighting Bird’s-Eye herself.
Still David stood unmoving. Will the mountain men consider their preacher a coward not to avenge the insult by fighting? Is a sound thrashing the only reply Bird’s-Eye is capable of understanding? But he’s been drinking—and anyway, he has a gun.
David’s face was ashen, but an icy calm seemed to have taken possession of him. Under his level, unwavering gaze some of the bravado left the mountaineer. Slowly Bird’s-Eye lowered the rifle and began shuffling his feet in the dust. The quietness in the yard was so intense that a cow mooing on a distant mountainside sounded like a bugle call.
From the beginning to end, David still had not spoken a word. Slowly his eyes traveled to the circle of men, as if trying to see how many friends he had among them. The silence seemed interminable. At last he spoke one sentence, “If any of you would like to hear my answer, come to church tomorrow.”
Then David stooped, picked up his mattock, turned his back, and attacked the last of the bushes on his strip.
On Sunday mornings the schoolroom was usually a comfortable half to three-quarters full of worshippers; today it was crowded. By now everyone in Cutter Gap knew about the incident between Bird’s-Eye Taylor and David at the Holt Working. Curiosity was rampant as to what the preacher’s answer would be to the challenge Bird’s-Eye had flung him.
The church service was at eleven o’clock. I had gotten there early and had found a place toward the back near the wall so that I could be as inconspicuous as possible. I sat there picking nervously at my nails, not realizing how tense I was until the base of a nail began bleeding.
As I had washed David’s raw hands in disinfectant and bandaged them the night before, he had been thoughtful, not talkative, as if the isolation thrust upon him at the Working had been complete—even from me. His eyes had a “No trespassing” look, as though he wanted to be left alone to think things out for himself.
Once during the night, a noise had wakened me and I had gotten out of bed to look out the front window. It was David, still up and walking back and forth near his bunkhouse in the moonlight. He looked like a man in deep thought—and deeper turmoil. At breakfast, though he had seemed weary, there had been a determined set to his jaw. Too determined. That was why I was afraid now.
What, I wondered, was the missing ingredient for communication with these people? This morning I was seeing them in the scene before me with fresh eyes. No effort was made to move my school desks each Sunday for the church service since the mission owned only five benches. Two of these “pews” had been placed at the side of the room to the left of the pulpit, the rest of them at the back. Already the adults had filled up the benches, leaving the low uncomfortable school desks for the children and young folks.
The front of the room was a mass of wriggling children, shuffling feet, and rustling Sunday-school papers. A couple of hound-dogs circled round and round the bucket of drinking water with its big dipper sitting on a stool. It was fortunate, I thought, that the bucket was just out of reach of the thirsty hounds; surely someone would run them out before the service began. All over the room were the bobbing heads of babies in arms. Now and again one of them would cry and the mother would unbutton her shirtwaist, pull out a breast, and let the baby nurse right there. Already I had grown accustomed to it.
But what I had not adjusted to—nor had David, he had told me—was the undignified, noisy type of worship service that the Cutter Gap folk wanted. In seminary David had been taught certain liturgical forms for church services. And even I, having never been near a seminary, had always known a degree of majesty in worship, the rich tapestry of words from Scripture and creeds and prayers mellow with age, pregnant with meaning, bequeathed from generation to generation. Snatches of those sonorous clauses hovered round my mind now: “That our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful . . .”
“Gloria in excelsis Deo . . .”
“For ye shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace . . .”
“Cantate Domino canticum novum. Alleluia alleluia . . . !”
And I could never hear words like that without visualizing a procession of monks in their drab robes—their faces half-hidden by their cowls—followed by the priests in their gorgeous vestments, slowly making their way along the shadowed arches of the nave of some medieval church. And above their heads would be the sunlight stabbing through jewel-like windows, each piece of stained glass put into place by the loving hands of artisans . . .
to give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death: to guide our feet into the way of peace . . .
I could see this caravan of worship winding down across continents and over centuries. I liked to think that I was somewhere in the procession, following in their train, using some of the same words that they had used . . .
Honor and majesty are before him;
strength and beauty are in his sanctuary . . .
But how could one worship and adore without at least a semblance of dignity? That was why I could sympathize with David in his desire to teach these mountain folk a little more about worship.
But so far the people had resisted any changes at all, and on the whole, Miss Alice sided with them. I remembered one of our afternoon sessions with her when David had quoted lines from some of the hymns that irked him most:
I’m ready to go, I’ll sail away . . .
or
He has taken a beautiful bud
Out of our garden of love . . .
Full blooming flowers alone will not do,
Some must be young and ungrown . . .
And he had put his head in his hands and groaned, “Why can’t I teach them some of the great music of the church?”
Miss Alice had laughed at him. “David, dear boy, haven’t you watched the people’s faces while they’re singing? Their foot-tapping hymns are one of the few joys of their lives. Why tamper with that? They’re praising God in their own way. Well—let them!”
So they were praising God in their own way right now because the first hymn was in full swing, and I do mean swing. And this was no medieval cathedral, but a raw wood church in Cutter Gap, Tennessee, with babies crying and children wriggling, and men standing just outside the church door dressed in overalls and spitting streams of tobacco juice.
There was a hypnotic quality in the wearisome repetition:
Hits the old ship of Zion, as she comes,
Hits the old ship of Zion, the old ship of Zion,
Hits the old ship of Zion, as she comes.
She’ll be loaded with bright angels, when she comes,
She’ll be loaded with bright angels . . .
The people sang lustily, tapping their toes, exactly as my school children did when they were singing ballads.
When it was time for the sermon, I found myself looking at the preacher with fresh eyes too. What did the people see? A tall young man who insisted on dressing in proper ministerial garb. For though David had so far given in on the choice of the hymns and the type of worship service, he would not be pressured about his own appearance in the pulpit. Dressed as he was now, he could have stepped into the pulpit of any city church—striped pants, a Prince Albert, a white shirt, a dark tie, his shoes shined, his black hair carefully combed.
I had noticed that when David was conducting a service or preaching, an innate dignity took over, so much so that he became rather a different personality in the pulpit from the everyday David. He even
spoke differently.
In fact, the first few times I had heard David preach, I had realized that in the pulpit he did not yet know how to speak the language of the Cove people. Since he was fresh from classes in theology, he was overly fond of words like “polemic,” “exegesis,” “syntax,” “Christological,” “Apocrypha” and that one that capped them all—“anthropomorphism.” Obviously, his congregations understood little of this.
Their reaction to not comprehending was the opposite of what I would have supposed: the Cutter Gap folk were enthusiastic about their new preacher’s sermonizing. His four and five-syllable words and his “highfalutin’ talk” had them convinced that they had snared the most educated preacher in those parts. The men had slapped David on the back so often and the women had complimented him so regularly that David had assumed that his ministry in the Cove was off to a great start—that is, until yesterday at the Holt working.
It was a sobered earnest David who stepped to one side of the little pulpit that had been placed on the platform where my teacher’s desk was during the week, and began: “I had planned to preach today on Mark 6:30–46, the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. But certain things have happened in the Cove in the last few days which must now be brought into the open. So folks, I’m not going to preach a sermon at all this morning. I’m just going to talk to you out of my heart.” And he thrust his notes to one side.
The children stopped shuffling their feet. There was silence in the room. The people were leaning forward, all attention. The men in the yard had crowded up to the door to listen.
“There are those among us who think that Christianity is just for Sundays and has nothing to do with the rest of the week; that religion should be kept within the walls of the church, that it has no bearing on life outside. They think that the preacher should stand up here on Sundays and give out a string of fancy, high-sounding talk. And if some of you don’t understand everything the minister has said, so much the better, you think. Well, this morning I want you to understand what I’m saying, so I’m going to talk in the simplest possible way.
“Some of you also feel that after the preacher has finished his Sunday service, he should shut his eyes to everything going on outside the church. ‘Mind your own business’ I have been told.
“But friends, the church’s business is my business. In deciding to become a minister, that’s the business I agreed to take on.
“Take on what? What is the church? Not just a building, certainly, because many a church in the first century had no building. People met in a room in someone’s home—or anywhere. We could hold church out under that tree there and in God’s eyes it would be just as real.
“Well then, is the church its minister? Not at all! Once again most of those first churches had no minister either as we understand the term. They had to rely on one another for their teaching and preaching—or on visiting evangelists and teachers—or on letters written by Paul and Peter and others. That’s why we have Paul’s epistles, for example, and the Letter to the church at Corinth, at Phillipi and so on. So the church is not the preacher.
“The church is a fellowship of people, you and me and folks like us who want Christ to be their Head or Leader.
“And where would He lead us? How does He want His church to act? Do you remember the story about Jesus standing in the outer court of the temple in Jerusalem, knotting cords together to form a whip to drive the moneychangers out of the temple, His muscles rippling beneath the bronzed skin, His eyes blazing with fury? Do you think that all those moneychangers, whose tables were overturned with the coins spilling everywhere took that without fighting back? They wouldn’t have been human if they had. But Christ dealt with them, Man to man.
“Once again, taking a look at the gospels, Jesus dealt in a special way with those who tried to justify their wrongs, who pretended to be good on the Sabbath and then did anything they liked the rest of the week. He had a way of looking them in the eyes, piercing through their double talk, penetrating their real motives. Then with utter fearlessness, He would tell them what He thought of the rottenness that He sometimes found there. Some of those men—as important in their community as our squires or sheriffs or judges here—He called ‘ye serpents, ye generation of vipers . . . hypocrites . . . blind guides . . . ravening wolves . . . whited sepulchres . . . doers of iniquity.’
“Men, those are fighting words any time, any place. They are also the words of a Man who has left behind any fear for Himself.
“Now in the last twenty-four hours I’ve done a lot of thinking about what Jesus’ attitude would be about us here in Cutter Gap right now in 1912. What’s His opinion of leaving religion shut up in the church on Sunday, about preachers who close their eyes to what goes on outside the church? And I am reminded that it was those very Sabbath-religionists whom He called ‘hypocrites . . . vipers . . . whited sepulchres.’
“He called them names like that because during the week they were cheating poor widows. They were involved in quarrels and lawsuits. They looked on women with lust. In their minds were evil thoughts, seductive picturings that led to fornication. They were hanging on to hate and resentments that led to killings and murders—even of good men, of prophets and apostles.
“The reason that Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the temple court was that they were greedy men who loved money, but who didn’t care one whit about the people. They short-changed their customers. They cheated. They even thought it was clever to cheat. And that dishonored God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I was caught up in what David was saying. Something had been added to him this morning. He was always earnest in the pulpit; but this was more than earnestness. For me, his words had wings.
“So I believe that this Jesus would say to us this morning,” and here David stepped back behind the pulpit again and leaned far over it, his eyes sweeping his congregation, as if to talk personally to each of us, “ ‘either you do right on Monday and Tuesday and Friday, or you needn’t come crying to me on Sunday.’ ‘Take heed,’ He warned, ‘that thy whole body be full of light . . . having no part dark.’
“You see, Jesus had watched how men who do evil always liked to work in the dark. ‘Everyone that doeth evil,’ He explained, ‘hateth the light lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light.’
“He talked about the light of the body being the eye. And He said, ‘If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.’
“The man of the single eye is the one who is as straight on Wednesday as on Sunday; the man who doesn’t have to work in darkness, who isn’t afraid of everyone knowing what he is doing.
“And Jesus went on to say, ‘No man can serve two masters.’ In other words, you can’t serve Christ on Sunday, and then on Monday nights serve evil. That just is not possible.
“Men and women, in this Cove there are those who are working at night—in the darkness—and they are serving evil.”
I felt my throat constrict, suddenly go dry. I dared not look at anyone. The front of the room was still quiet, the children as if mesmerized. But at the back among the men near me, I could sense the beginning of restlessness—whispering, muttering. Prickles ran up and down my spine. David was hitting too hard.
“The white lightning being brewed here is the devil’s own brew. You know and I know that it inflames men, that it leads to lust and quarrels and fights and killings. And now even schoolboys are being used to help sell this blockade liquor. That too is evil’s own work. There are other abominations too. I can’t talk about them all this morning but, folks, speak about them I will straight out from time to time from this pulpit.
“Because folks, the Christian religion is not a thing—like a piece of paper—that we can tuck away in the cubbyhole of a rolltop desk and then put the lid down and lock it. Christianity is a life and contains the germ of life in itself. If you were to confine life in a coffin and nail the lid on, the life would die. Even
so, Christianity dies just as surely every time we confine it.
“So Christ meant for life inside the church on Sunday and life outside the church on every day to be of one piece. That was why He declared unrelenting, unending warfare against the sin and evil in our world. And believe me that includes the evil in Cutter Gap. All these wrongs must be brought into the light of day. Even as Jesus pitted the strength of His manhood against the moneychangers, so now in June, 1912, He pits all His strength against the deviltries in our Cove.
“Don’t make the mistake, men and women, of underestimating Him. Our God cannot lose; He will not lose the fight against evil in this Cove or anywhere in our world.”
He paused. His face was flushed, his eyes glowing, “How many of you want to be on His side? Do you?” He was pointing his finger. “And you? How about you?”
I was caught up in the intensity of David’s emotion. Then just as he was saying, “Let us pray,” someone tapped me on the shoulder. I jumped, turned around. It was Dr. MacNeill who had somehow pressed through the tightly packed group at the door.
“Can you come with me?” he whispered. There was urgency in his voice.
Dr. MacNeill said nothing more until we were well out of earshot of the group at the church door. “I hated to barge in on you at church,” he began, “but I’ve an emergency on my hands.”
I looked at him questioningly, my thoughts still partly back in the church.
“It’s Little Burl. A torn abdominal muscle with a localized abscess. I’m going to have to operate right away. Will you help, Christy?”
This jerked me into the present in a hurry. Little Burl! And I was no good at this sort of thing. I made a gigantic effort to focus my thinking. “Dr. MacNeill, I’d do anything to help Little Burl. But you ought to know—I had to dash for air during his father’s operation. And I wasn’t in the front row either. I’m willing to help—but suppose I fold up on you?”
Christy Page 29
