Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  It turned out to be a pathetic assortment: two pokers, a fireplace shovel, some planks which David had put aside for another bookcase. From the kitchen, Miss Ida brought three cast iron frying pans to add to the pile. “One good whack on the head with one of these,” she said, waving it. I could feel the swish of air and dimly see her moving form. I ducked out of the way of the lunging figure in the voluminous nightgown thrashing the frying pan about in that ferocious stance. I could imagine the fire in her eyes, ugly as she could be—even though she was David’s sister. Her funny pantomime released some of the tension I had been reining in, and nervously I laughed aloud.

  The men outside must have heard. “Thar’s our doney gal,” a voice called out. “Cuttin’ up capers, plumb feisty. How ’bout some sweetheartin’?”

  We heard them pounding around to the front porch again. My laugh had been a mistake.

  “We’re goin’ whiffle right through the door to git our doney gal. We’re caigy—”

  Now I really was frightened. I felt Miss Ida’s hand cover mine. “Don’t answer, Christy. Not a word from you. Let me try to find out who they really are.”

  She went to the door, Ruby Mae and I close behind her. “Who are you? And what do you want?” she called out in a loud, clear voice through the door. “I’m Ida Grantland, David’s sister.”

  “It’s the old ’un, poppin’ her teeth,” we heard one man say. “We just drapped by,” another voice picked up. “Ah, maw, don’t be nervish now. We’re not likkered up.”

  “You are too liquored up,” Miss Ida retorted. “And I want you to leave here right now.” She was trying to put authority into her voice.

  “Ah now, maw, don’t be tetchious.” Then with a sudden shift of mood, “Ye needn’t shurl up yer nose at us. We belong in thar. No wimmin-folks are a-goin’ tell us what to do. We come for Tom McHone.”

  I grabbed at Miss Ida’s arm. “Don’t answer yet,” I whispered desperately. “Let’s get back away from the door. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

  She went with me to the back hall, and I put my mouth close to her ear. “Miss Ida, don’t tell them that Tom has gone. If we let them know that, they’ll head right for his cabin to kill him.”

  “But if we don’t tell them,” she whispered back, “then they’ll get mad and break in. And you know the vile notions your laugh gave them. But I don’t recognize Bird’s-Eye’s voice out there. Must be men he’s rounded up, heavens knows where. They may be capable of anything.”

  “But if we tell them, they’ll murder Tom in bed.”

  “Christy, come morning, they’ll find out that Tom’s back home anyway. I’ve got to think of you and Ruby Mae. We can’t risk those men breaking in.”

  “Well, at least let’s try stalling a little longer,” I pleaded. “Promise me you’ll wait as long as you can. Maybe somebody will come riding by. Or maybe they’ll just get tired and leave.”

  “I’ll try,” Miss Ida agreed, “but you keep out of this. Not one word from you.” She was more concerned about Ruby Mae and me than about herself, and at that moment I was more fond of her than I had ever been.

  “What’s goin’ on in thar?” came through the door. Then guffaws. “Air ye chiseled down? Give us a glimpse of ye.”

  Miss Ida went close to the pile of furniture at the door to try a new argument. “Miss Henderson is going to hear this racket and be up here any minute now. I advise you men not to be foolish. You’d better leave quietly before you get in real trouble.”

  Actually I knew that Miss Alice’s bedroom was on the far side of the cabin from the mission house, and that there was little likelihood that she would hear unless the men got really raucous.

  “We’uns not scairt of her. Folks say she’d jump out’n the way of a worm ruther’n step on it.”

  Then came a lull. Plainly we could hear the gurgling of liquid in a jug as it passed from hand to hand. The picture began to come clear; Bird’s-Eye must be hiding out somewhere and had sent men to abduct or kill Tom. But as usual liquor was sabotaging their mission. This accounted for their erratic behavior. If they really wanted to break in, all they needed to do was to smash the glass in a window. It would have been so easy. I now saw a glimmer of hope: hold out, let that corn liquor pouring down their throats take full effect. Then they just might forget about Tom, forget everything.

  The minutes dragged on with the banter outside getting more ribald all the time. “Open up and we’ll have a real play-party, a real hullaballoo. Mought even give ye a swig of our bumblings.”

  “Naw, maw, we ain’t a-gonna lay off! We’re in no swiv-vit, can outwait ye onytime. It’s the laughin’ one we want.”

  “No hardness atween us,” a deeper voice picked up. “We don’t aim to hurt ye none, jest enjoy ye. Come on now, we’ll even let Tom agg hit up too.”

  “Hell we will.” The voices were getting thicker all the time. “I done told ye, it’s the blossom-eyed laughin’ one for me. Come on, let’s go on in thar.”

  Then all at once, fortune was with us. It began raining—hard, a real gully-­washer. “Hey, lay off, turn off that Noah rain. Ye ain’t a-gonna outsharp us with nothin’ like that.” There followed strings of profanity so raw that I had never before heard most of the four-letter words.

  Lightning stabbed the sky. Thunder growled, reverberating from peak to peak across the narrow valley. Out of the northeast a strong wind sprang up, driving the rain in horizontal sheets against the windowpanes, flooding the porch. By now the men would be drenched and yes, their spirits had been dampened too because their guffaws were drifting away. Ruby Mae, crouching under one of the front windows listening, finally announced, “Oh hallelujah, glory be, they’ve gone. They’ve left fer good, I do believe they have. Can’t hear nothin’ a-tall now except the rain.”

  Desperately weary from all the tension, I lighted one of the lamps to look at a clock. It was four-thirty in the morning. Without another word, too tired even to make any comments about our moments of terror or to move any of the furniture back into place, we listened awhile longer, then hearing nothing more, crept upstairs and crawled into our beds.

  Tomorrow I knew that except for those barricaded doors to remind us, the events of this night would seem like part of the nightmare with which I had begun the night.

  David arrived back late the next afternoon, not in good spirits. The trip to Knoxville had been less successful than he had hoped. Not only had Bird’s-Eye escaped jail, but all the other prisoners too. This emptying of the Lyleton jail—even of the especially strong cage in the center of the jail-room in which the most dangerous prisoners were confined—had been so dramatic and cheeky that scathing criticism had been heaped on the officers. Consequently, David had found the law officers glum and uncommunicative, harried by lampooning. Their attitude was that the less they heard from anybody in Cutter Gap for a while, the better they would like it.

  After finding the jailer and the Lyleton police so morose, David had sought out the Federal agent, Gentry Long. Mr. Long had been taciturn too. He had talked to David kindly enough; thanked him for all the trouble he had gone to on the first raid; put on a show of assurance about arresting Bird’s-Eye and Nathan again before many days. But when David had tried to get the details of the raid in which Tom had been shot, Mr. Long had dodged with, “Oh, that! That’s past history, old hat. One of the principles they pound into us agents is never to look back—always to concentrate on the present and the immediate future.”

  Nor had Marshal Long given David a clear answer about whether Tom would be tried. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Grantland. No problem there. We know where McHone is, have our eyes on him.” He had laughed (David called it a mirthless laugh). “After all, the county squire can’t very well lose his own son for long.”

  So that was that, leaving us where we had started with most of our questions unanswered. For the first time I could sympathize a bit with the mountaineer’s attitude toward the law. It looked as if we could expect little
help from Lyleton or Knoxville and were completely on our own. I could see now why sometimes in desperation the mountain men had gotten together their own posses, deciding that unofficial action was better than no action.

  Then when David heard about the wild incident of the night before, he was furious. On the spot, he decreed that we women would never again be left unarmed and that we were going to learn to shoot. Target practice, he announced crisply, would begin the following afternoon in the front yard of the mission where all who passed by could see.

  After dinner David went off to the corner of the front porch to read a book he had bought in Knoxville. I hesitated, but then decided to approach the thing directly.

  “David,” I asked, “could I talk to you for a moment?”

  “Why sure, Christy.” He laid the book aside. It looked like a novel.

  “I always seem to be full of questions but I don’t know how else to get answers.” I paused, trying to decide how to begin. “I did talk to Dr. MacNeill yesterday while you were gone. It was a rather unsatisfactory experience.”

  David looked startled, so I rushed on to stop the direction of his thoughts. “No, nothing he did, only the things he said.”

  “So he did reveal something about the raid?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “You mean that? Literally nothing?”

  “Not one single fact.”

  “That seems scarcely possible. Well then, what did you talk about?”

  “David, either he doesn’t know anything about the raid or else he’s the best actor I’ve ever seen. But it isn’t the moonshining I want to talk about right now. It’s this other thing. It’s—well . . .”

  “Go on, I’m listening.”

  “You asked what the doctor and I talked about. It’s—David, I was a bit surprised to find that the doctor is practically an atheist. That put me off, but not too much. But when the doctor questioned me about my beliefs, I—I just talked around in circles and didn’t even make sense. It was humiliating.”

  “But why should you feel that you have to explain your faith to him? The doctor is odd in some ways. I’m afraid he was just trying to get your goat.”

  “Perhaps so, but there is no reason why I couldn’t give him straight answers to his questions. What good will I be as a school teacher if I don’t know where I stand as a Christian? David, when you tell people why you are a Christian, what do you say?”

  Momentarily he looked startled. Then he began smoothly, “Christy, if I answered that question fully, we’d be here all night—and I’m done in.”

  “Well, don’t try to go into detail, just the essence.”

  David looked reflective. “Well, I can tell you one thing, I’m no hell-­and-damnation preacher. I believe the ways of God are written into the law of nature and therefore there’s a scientific explanation for everything.”

  “Are you talking about the Bible, David?”

  “Well, yes—and no.

  “I don’t believe that every word in the Bible is true like some fundamentalists do,” David continued. “At seminary most of us felt that the seemingly weird and mysterious happenings in the Bible have perfectly natural explanations—if we but knew.”

  “What about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead?” I asked. “Bethany was only a little village and everybody would have known Lazarus. You couldn’t hide an event like that.”

  “That’s a tough one, I’ll admit,” David said thoughtfully. “But you have to realize that these stories were passed to us through many people and many generations and many translations of the Bible. Lazarus may only have been in a coma. There could be any number of explanations.”

  “David, then you don’t—well—really believe in Jesus’ miracles?”

  “Christy, you’re getting into deep theological water which, I’m afraid, will only confuse you more. Let me say this. I don’t believe it matters so much what you believe as how you live. Jesus was concerned with ending injustices, with people’s health, how they lived, whether they forgave one another—all that. Dogma isn’t important. It’s the results in the community that count. As for the Bible it’s an amazing book, the greatest book of wisdom we have.”

  “But David,” I interrupted, “my minister in Asheville was always saying that the Bible is more than that; that it’s the inspired Word of God and that our only chance for admission into the kingdom of heaven on earth or in the next life is to believe that Jesus is who He claimed to be. He used to say things like that over and over. Yet I can see now that I never knew what he meant, not really.”

  “Christy, you have to face facts. There are almost as many different beliefs as there are Christians. And I’m afraid that doesn’t help those outside the church any either.”

  “So you’re telling me that I have to make my own decisions about what to believe and not to believe?”

  “That’s what it generally comes to.”

  “But that makes Christianity sound like—like vegetable soup—full of most anything and everything.”

  David laughed. “I wish you could have been in some of our discussions at seminary. You would have made a big hit.”

  David was moving off the subject and I felt unsatisfied. “One more question and then I’ll quit, David. Why are you here, now, at this mission?”

  “Because I was assigned here for a job that needed to be done. But just the same, I—”

  The screen door banged. It was Miss Ida coming toward us, marching like a sergeant major. She had been listening, I was sure she had. Even in the dim light, I could see the fingers of her right hand rubbing back and forth across her thumbnail with that gesture she used when she was especially irritated. “David, you’ve had a hard two days,” she said sharply, then looked at me. “If David took time to give a course in theology to one girl at a time, he’d never get anything done. Besides, I never realized you were so interested in theology, Miss Huddleston.”

  “Yes, I really am.”

  “Oh, I’m sure! That’s what all the girls say.”

  David laughed at her. “Come off it, Ida. But it is late. I’ll knock it off and turn in.”

  He seemed relieved at the interruption.

  The next afternoon, as soon as my last pupil had gone for the day I started for Miss Alice’s cabin. She was at home and showed no surprise when she opened the door and saw me standing there.

  I had scarcely gotten inside before I found myself saying with no preliminaries, “I have to talk to you. Two days ago in talking with Dr. MacNeill, I discovered something about myself. It’s that I really don’t know what I believe about my religion. I guess I never thought it through before. I made a stupid hash of answering some simple questions Dr. MacNeill put to me. It was embarrassing.”

  The half-smile around Miss Alice’s lips and her gray eyes looking into mine conveyed the message, “Go on. I’m listening.” Out of her quietness a thought flowed to me: was I more embarrassed because of the bad impression I had made on the doctor or because I was confused about my belief?

  I blurted out, “Miss Alice, I’m here because something on the inside of me seemed to point an imperious finger in your direction and command, ‘Go!’ ”

  A smile tugged at her mouth. “Christy, child, whatever that is on the inside of thee, it certainly has rare dramatic talent. It should go on tour immediately to play Hamlet or Macbeth. But thee was speaking of a conversation with the doctor about religion.”

  “Yes, I’ll say this about Dr. MacNeill: his questions were clear all right. Maybe his medical training helps him to think clearly. But suddenly I got to remembering all the vague preaching I’ve heard and the foggy Sunday-school teaching and the fuzzy religion in general. Why does it have to be that way?”

  “But what were those clear questions of Neil’s?”

  “He accused me of parroting other people—you especially, I may as well tell you. He wanted to know what I believe about God. I think he put it, ‘What’s your working philosophy of life? Why is this Christianity
important to you?’ He wanted to know what difference it makes to me.”

  “And your answer left you dissatisfied?”

  “Worse than that. I didn’t have answers. That’s a horrid discovery to make.”

  “That’s a great discovery to make.” The gray eyes were sparkling now.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It’s quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you’ve picked up some place or other, and die—never having come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about. But you, Christy, are facing these issues early. That’s good.”

  “But Miss Alice, how do I fathom what life is all about? Here are all these great philosophers across the centuries with better minds than I have, and one religion says this and another religion says that. Maybe one religion is as good as another. Who knows? Maybe there isn’t any final truth. How can a person like me be sure?”

  “Somebody very wise anticipated your question. All thoughtful men ask the same question sooner or later. So He left us a way so that we can be sure. It’s as specific as a doctor’s prescription or as an algebraic equation. Here, I’ll write it down for you.”

  There was a little desk in the corner. Miss Alice went over to it, sat down, opened one of the desk’s cubbyholes, took out a piece of notepaper, and began to write. As I stood watching her, a faint fragrance—something like dried sweet clover, only a bit more aromatic—wafted toward me. It stirred some memory but at the moment I could not recapture it.

  Then Miss Alice blotted the paper, folded it, and handed it to me. “Whenever you’ve taken a written prescription from your doctor,” she said, “the first step after that is yours. You move on this,” she indicated the folded paper she had given me, “and then God will move. I’ll guarantee it. And as for religion being vague—well, it isn’t. It’s been the delight of my life to find God far more common sense and practical than any human I know. The only time I ever find my dealings with God less than clear-cut is when I’m not being honest with Him. The fuzziness is always on my side, not His.”