Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  He moved towards Hilton, his face grave.

  “Howdy, Benton,” Hilton said, “how’s things out yore way?”

  “Awright, I reckon,” Tom sighed. “Only . . .”

  “Only what?” Hilton said.

  “Mighty lonesome out there. A body’s got too much time for thinking.”

  “That so? And with all that time, Tom Benton,” the land agent grinned, “I’d sure Lord like to hear just what you’ve thought up now.”

  “Don’t know as how you’d believe it,” Tom said gravely. “It’s the baby coming that put some strange ideas in my head. Strange for me—that is. Helpless little mite—won’t have nobody to look up to ‘cept me—his paw. Now I ain’t never been nothing much. I’ll admit that. But with my boy on the way, I’ll tell you, Hilton—for the first time I got a hankering to live decent. Sary ‘n’ me’s married now; but that ain’t enough. Got to do something to pay back for the sin I led her into. Wasn’t her fault none a-tall.”

  Hilton stared at him.

  “That’s why I was glad,” Tom went on, “when I read that there notice of the Protracted Meeting. I’m gonna come to that meeting, Hilton. I’m gonna come every night till I feel the burden of sin lifted off my shoulders. A married man with children’s got to be right with God.”

  “Well, I’ll be double damned!” Hilton swore; “whoever would of believed it!”

  “ ‘Tis a fact,” Tom said. “You don’t know how it is. Sitting there with Sary after the work’s all done and sayin’ to yourself real quiet-like: Tom Benton, you’re a liar and a thief and maybe even a murderer. Tom Benton, there’s hell-fire awaiting you; there’s evil on yore soul.”

  Hilton studied his face shrewdly.

  “You need wimmenfoiks to help with the birthing,” he said dryly. “By now you ought to be considering raising a barn. Need menfolks around to help with that. That’s it, ain’t it, Tom? Win them over with your faked repentance.”

  “Why, Mister Hilton!” Tom’s tone was genuinely grieved, “I never thought—”

  “The hell you didn’t!” Hilton laughed. “Damn my soul, but you’re a cunning cuss, Benton! And the funny part about it is, I like you. Some folks takes a day off now ‘n then from being a bastard; but you work at it all the time.”

  Tom stared at him, thinking: Awright, I owe you money. But the day I pay it back I’m gonna push yore store-boughten teeth right down yore craw, and I hope you choke!

  “Don’t worry,” Hilton said, “I don’t aim to let on. Wouldn’t spoil this here show for nothing in the world. I’m going to be there front and centre to see you do yore play-acting, Tom. Besides, I got to protect my investment. You can’t pay me back lessen you git your crop in. By God, this is going to be something! I’ll spread the word around. Reverend Silas is going to be mighty grateful—biggest drawing card he ever had.”

  He put out his hand. Tom grinned, and took it.

  “One thing, Tom. Don’t give in too quick. Wrestle with the devil a long time. Give ‘em a good show. Keep coming back night after night, letting ‘em see you suffer. By the time the second week is out, you’ll have the whole parish on your side. Get yourself more friends than you can shake a stick at, by the time you do give in!”

  “I’ll remember,” Tom Benton said.

  With Sarah, it was pitifully easy. Listening to his slow, hesitating words, dragged up, it seemed to her, from the depths of his tortured soul, she wept tears of joy.

  “Knowed you was good, Tom-love,” she sobbed; “knowed all the time you was a real good man!”

  They set out for the meeting dressed in their Sunday best. For Sarah, it was an ordeal. But Tom looked into the sea of faces around the tent under the Spanish moss with secret joy. Reverend Boone had already raised a hymn; but as Tom and Sarah entered the tent, it died.

  The preacher stared at the newcomers. Then he glanced at Hilton. Slowly, theatrically, the land agent nodded. Silas Boone rushed forward, his big hands outstretched.

  “Welcome, my children!” he boomed. “Come right here up front and set down!” Then, leaning closer, he whispered:

  “Heard all about you folks. Mighty glad to see you here; yessir, mighty glad! ‘There’s more rejoicing in Heaven over one sinner saved—’ you know.”

  “Yessir,” Tom said humbly. “Reckon we’ve got a powerful lot to atone for, Reverend.”

  The preacher turned to the congregation.

  “Friends!” he roared, “this here is a joyous moment! That these folks have come here, braving your righteous scorn, shows their hearts are in the right place! Now’s the time to display some Christian charity—not to mention the fact that I ain’t yet found out how many of the rest of you’s got hands clean enough to be flingin’ stones! Yessir—a joyous moment! Friends, let’s sing: ‘Washed in the Blood of the Lamb!’

  The hymn soared forth, the congregation shaking the tent with their fervour.

  Like all good revivalists, Reverend Boone had intended to pace himself; but the unexpected opportunity to work upon two such first-class sinners inspired him. He outdid himself. Taking his text from the story of the woman caught in adultery, he set out upon a mighty effort to leave not one dry eye in the tent. He succeeded. Even Tom scarcely needed his hidden onion shoot.

  Sinners came forward in droves, weeping and confessing their sins. Only shame and fear kept Sarah back. But listening to some of the other women, she came to the astonished realisation that her sin was not unique or even unusual. What she had lacked was the cunning to conceal it. Back-country morals, she learned that night, certainly weren’t anything to brag about.

  She stole a glance at Tom. He was concealing a grin behind his bandanna as they listened to a recital by a rather ill-favoured country woman which named four of the men present in the tent as her partners in sin.

  “She’s braggin’,” Tom whispered, “or dreaming. Even the pop-skull they make in these here swamps ain’t gonna drive a man to pleasuring hisself with that scrawny old witch!”

  “Tom!” Sarah was scandalised; “you hush!”

  “Sorry, hon,” Tom grinned.

  The country woman’s confession diverted the Reverend Boone’s efforts towards bringing forward the four men the woman had named. Three of them came sheepishly to the mourner’s bench at last, more, Tom was sure, out of their Southern-bred unwillingness to deny a woman’s word than for any other reason. But the fourth was made of stouter stuff.

  “She’s lying, Reverend,” he said flatly; “I’ll take my Bible oath that ain’t nary a word of what she said is the truth!”

  The uproar that followed gave Tom a chance to lead Sarah away from the meeting.

  “Won’t do to overtax yourself, Sary,” he said. “We got plenty of time.”

  But the very next night, Sarah gave in. She went forward and started confessing her sin in such a low voice that the people in the back of the tent started calling:

  “Speak louder, sister! We can’t hear you! Don’t be shamed to speak out before the Lord!”

  Sarah spoke out clearly, but Tom caught only snatches of it. He was too busy watching the faces of the women around him. Fury worked in his veins.

  Look at ‘em! he thought angrily. Just look! Mouth hanging open half-panting like a pack o’ bitches in heat. Look at their nostrils a-quivering! This is what they call goodness. This is supposed to do their souls good. Hell! Every living one of ‘em’s got a cesspool for a mind, and what they’re exercising right now sure Lord ain’t goodness. Give their husbands a hard time tonight when they git home, them what’s got husbands. And half the rest of ‘em will be easy marks for any man what’s got a mind to . . .

  He sat there clenching and unclenching his big hands. Someone touched his shoulder. He whirled.

  “Easy, son,” the old man behind him said. “We see your sufferin’ and we respects it. Just keep a tight rein on—yore time will come.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Tom said humbly, “but it’s mighty hard.”

  Can’t do that,
he thought quickly. Almost give myself away that time. Like he says, got to keep a rein on, but not for the reasons he thinks. Hilton said it would call for playactin’—well, from now on, I’m gonna give ‘em a real show!

  Of them all, only Hilton was able to appreciate what a show it was. At times, during those two weeks, Tom was dangerously close to overdoing it; but he always caught himself in time. He reached the stage where he could produce tears without the aid of an onion. Near the end of the second week, he had learned to start up as though about to rush forward, then he would sit down again with a sad shake of his head.

  Friday night, he took five steps down the aisle before turning back. Willing hands seized him to drag him forward.

  “I can’t, brothers!” he sobbed. “I just can’t. Old Satan’s still too strong!”

  “Let him be, brothers!” Reverend Silas cried. “Can’t you see there’s warfare going on in his soul?”

  The thing itself had its own definite rhythm—its own throbbing, orgiastic pace. They, the back-country people, had come from ancestors whose faith had grown pale and quiet in their ancient, tired lands. But now, here, in the back-bayou country, they had reverted easily to type, slipping backward over the centuries to the blond barbarians who dyed their beards blue and worshipped cruel, vengeful gods in sound and fury. That was part of it, but there was more. Being Protestant, they had inherited a religion their stiff-necked, logical reformer forebears had robbed of pageantry, of beauty, and of joy, holding these things rightly to be pagan, but forgetting in their righteousness that man, living, is forever pagan, that civilisation is the old age of a people, that the loss of naïveté, barbarism, colour, is a symptom of approaching senility, a foretaste of racial death.

  Here in their new home of bayous over which the morning haze brooded, of fields shimmering in the wash of sun, under the blue immensity of sky, they had had to go back again, to break out of their prison of Puritanism, give vent to the passion, force, joy boiling within them, take away, in fact, the religion from gentle Jesus, who had never suited them, and give it back to Astarte, who did; putting it once more upon its true, ancient basis of carnal lusts, reviving the voluptuous joys wisely retained by the Mother Church of reliving the cherished sin once more in the telling, combining it with back-country brag, to the tune of hammering chants having all the beat and cadence of tom-toms, to the staccato of hand-clapping, the pounding of two hundred feet in tune upon the earthen floor, punctuated by the shuddering cries of women caught up in an ecstasy truly sexual, set off by the contrapuntal bass thunder of male shouting.

  So it was. And by that final Saturday it had reached almost its peak, the point of near-explosion, so that afterwards there would be nothing left for them to do but to go back again to their empty lives which made these semiannual descents into barbarism necessary, lolling in a lethargy as complete—being, in fact, the same—as that which follows love. But not yet. There remained the mounting tension, the terrible up-surge of passion which this one last night must release.

  Coming up to the tent, Tom Benton could feel it throbbing through the very air. A hundred pairs of eyes were upon them, glowing with savage anticipation, so that Sarah, feeling it, clung fearfully to his arm. Eager men and women opened a path for them with great ceremony. Tom felt Sarah tremb1ing, her fingers working convulsively on his arm.

  “You got to, tonight, Tom,” she whispered. “You just naturally got to. I can’t stand it no more.”

  “Don’t worry yore pretty head, Sary-gal,” Tom said. “Tonight I feel the spirit moving—I sure Lord do!”

  “Thank the Lord for that,” Sarah murmured.

  Tom glanced aside just before they entered the tent. A group of young girls stood on the little rise, close to the bayou’s edge, staring at him. Meeting his gaze, they giggled a little, but their eyes didn’t waver.

  I’ll be a son of a maverick! Tom thought happily. Always a few like that hanging around a camp meeting. Religion affects them thataway, warms their sweet little veins up, and sets the juices a-jangling. My paw always said you could pretty nigh reckon the time of the last Protracted Meeting by the bumper crop of nameless brats that showed up nine months later—heap of ‘em looking mighty like the preacher hisself!

  He looked at the girls once more. And it was then that he saw her. She stood a little apart from the others—physically; but ages and aons and unbridgeable chasms apart in spirit. She was dark, with great masses of black hair spilling about her shoulders, and enormous brown eyes, soft and velvety like the eyes of a startled fawn. She was as young as the blonde poor whites, but she seemed at the same time younger, and older. She stood there looking at him gravely, without the self-consciousness of the others, studying his face as though she meant to memorise every line of it, looking at him in wonder and interest, so that he, feeling her gaze, slowed his pace.

  Cajun or Creole one, he thought; and mine for the axin’. Lord God, but she’s a pretty thing! Just you wait right there until after I gets converted. Don’t you go nowheres, you sweet little half-wild critter. I’ll be back—and I’ll have the power, the glory and the holy spirit to share with you then, baby-doll!

  He was still staring at her as he passed through the tied-back flap of the big tent. But at the last possible moment he was rewarded: the full, wine-red lips drew upwards at the corners in the slightest possible suggestion of a smile.

  Doggone my miserable wicked soul! he laughed inside his mind. This getting religion business ain’t a-tall bad, come to think of it!

  He looked quickly at Sarah to see whether she had noticed anything. But Sarah was looking ahead, her underlip caught hard between her teeth.

  Tom felt a rush of something as close to shame as he was capable of. It’s like this, Sary-gal, he explained wordlessly, ‘tain’t like you’ll ever find out—even like it means something. It’s just that I’m a hot-blooded man, you know that, and whilest you’re like this we can’t—Lord God, Sary, you can’t expect a man to go all these months without . . .

  “ ‘Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!’ ” the Reverend Silas Boone roared; and the thunder of the hymn drowned Tom Benton’s thoughts.

  It would be a long time before anybody there forgot that last night. Reverend Boone started with a prayer for this lost, poor, sinful brother, who had a man’s life and maybe the loss of that man’s immortal soul upon his conscience. The preacher had a good voice, big and deep and rich, and he used it now like an organ, making dark thunder. Before he was half-way through, everyone there was moaning and stamping their feet.

  “Tom Benton!” the preacher thundered. “You stand up!” Tom got to his feet sheepishly, hanging his head. “Tom Benton,” Silas moaned, “the Devil’s got aholt on yore soul! Got to git him out! Got to trip him up; got to throw him! Brothers and sisters, I’m a-gonna wrastle that old Devil for the possession of this man’s soul!”

  He straightened up, tore off his frock-coat, hurled it to the ground. His fingers yanked at his string tie. It followed the coat to the hard-packed earth. Then the preacher rolled up his shirt-sleeves and fell into a crouch.

  “Come on, old Satan!” he bellowed, “show some fight! Can’t win, you know! Can’t, ‘cause the Good Lord’s on my side!”

  He pranced about, seizing imaginary holds.

  “Slippery old Devil!” he panted. “Feel him weakening yet, brother?”

  “Not yet, Reverend,” Tom Benton groaned.

  He stood there trembling for ten long minutes, his brain working swiftly, surely, well. He could see the preacher’s shirt was sweat-soaked. All the women moaned.

  Then, very slowly, Tom let his body jerk.

  “You’re a-gittin’ him, Reverend!” he gasped; “you’re a-gittin’ aholt on him now!”

  “Good!” Reverend Boone roared out. “Gonna git him now, brother—gonna git him shore!”

  Tom let the jerks increase. Big tears rolled down his lean cheeks. Then he threw back his head.

  “Glory hallelujah!” he cried; “I fee
l the spirit! God bless you, Reverend, you got him! I’m free! You hear me, friends! I’m free!”

  Then, gasping and sobbing, he plunged forward and fell full-length before the mourner’s bench.

  “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!” Silas Boone thundered.

  The whole tent was a crashing bedlam of sound. Men shouted; women shrieked; children, frightened by the uproar, cried.

  Henry Hilton sat there, wiping his forehead.

  Damn my soul, he thought; told you to give them a show, but you outdid yourself, Tom Benton! By God, if I didn’t know you, I’d think you meant it!

  Two of the women were seized with convulsive spasms. The shouting boomed, the shrieks were edged. Hilton saw Sarah slip quietly to the ground in a dead faint. He bent down and picked her up.

  “Some of you wimmen go ‘long with Brother Hilton.” The preacher commanded. “Brother Benton’ll be home later—he’s still got to confess his sins and be received into the fellowship of the righteous.”

  After it was done, after Tom had publicly wept and told how he had suffered for his crimes, he found himself surrounded. He frowned, thinking of the swamp girl.

  Got to git shut of them, he thought; got to. Keep up like this, won’t be no way for me to claim the rewards of righteousness.

  He let his big body slump.

  “Lemme go, brothers,” he said; “I want to walk in the darkness alone and meditate. I want to commune with God in quiet. Been too much excitement now. Got to calm my soul afore I kin go home to the sweet gal I led so close to damnation.”

  “Let him go,” Silas Boone said. “Tomorrow, friends, at eleven o’clock we’re going to baptize all the sinners in the bayou. For though their sins be as scarlet, yet they shall be whiter than snow, once they’ve been washed in the blood of the Lamb!”

  Tom staggered out of the tent. He seemed drunk with weariness. But he didn’t go towards the oak grove. Instead, he walked southward, towards Natchitoches. When he was sure that no one was following him, he struck off across the fields in a long, looping circle, until he was safely past the tent once more.