by Davis Grubb
Ben lifted him by the shoulders and flung him against the wall and banged his head against the stone to the rhythm of his words. Now the other convicts were yelling and banging for silence along the row.
What! What! What! What!
Preacher gasped and choked.
You—you was—you was quotin’ the Book, Ben.
I which?
You was quotin’ the Scripture! You said—you said, And a little child shall lead them.
Ben let go then and got back down in his bunk again and rolled up one of his socks and stuffed it into his mouth before he went back to sleep, and next morning when he woke to the siren’s vast, echoing contralto the sock was still in his mouth, foul-tasting and thick on his dry tongue, but he knew, at least, that he had not talked. He spat it out and grinned across the cell at Preacher, dressed and shaved long before the morning siren blew. His nose was swollen and his eyes were puffed and black from the blow Ben had given him. Ben laughed out loud. Nothing would ever stop Preacher. Already the glitter was back of those hunting eyes; already the question was forming again behind those thin, mad lips. A feller almost had to hand it to Preacher.
Ben?
What, Preacher?
I’ll be leaving this place in another month. You’ll be dead then, Ben. Dead and gone to make your peace with God! Now if you was to tell me, boy, it might go easier. Why, Ben, with that ten thousand dollars I could build a tabernacle that would make that Wheeling Island place look like a chickenhouse! I’d even name it after you, boy! The Ben Harper Tabernacle! How’s that sound? It’d be the glory of them all, Ben! The finest gospel tabernacle on the whole Ohio River!
Keep talkin’, Preacher.
The Lord might feel kindly turned toward you, Ben! The Lord might say: What’s a little murder—
Would you have free candy for the kids, Preacher?
Well, yes, I would.
Would you give out free eats to all the poor folks that was hungry, Preacher?
Don’t jest, Ben.
I ain’t jestin’, Preacher. Would you?
Yes, Ben. If you say so, boy. It’d be your tabernacle. All them poor souls out there wanderin’ around hungry in this terr’ble depression—all them folks driven to stealin’ and whorin’! Just think, Ben! They’d come there and bless your name!
Ben Harper bends and searches under the bunk for his other sock.
Keep talkin’, Preacher, he chuckles. Keep talkin’!
—
And the other one had his dreams, too. He would lie there in the dark and when he wasn’t thinking about new ways to make Ben talk he would think about the women. He could never be exactly sure how many there had been. Sometimes there were twelve and sometimes it was only six and then again they would all blend together into one and her face would rise up in the wavering chiaroscuro of his dreams like the Whore of Sodom and not until his hand stole under his blanket and wound round the bone hasp of the faithful knife did the face blanch and dissolve into a spasm of horror and flee back into the darkness again. He was bad at remembering facts, dates, places, names. And yet fragments would return with shocking verisimilitude: the broken chards of forgotten times, lost names, dead faces; these would return and he would know for that instant what he had felt toward the time, the name, the place, and how God had spoken clear to him and told him what he had to do. The knife beneath the wool, the Sword of Jehovah beneath his wrathful fingers. God sent people to him. God told him what to do. And it was always a widow that God brought to him. A widow with a little wad of money in the dining-room sugar bowl and perhaps a little more in the county bank. The Lord provided. Sometimes it was only a few hundred dollars but he would thank the Lord just the same when it was all over and done with and everything was smoothed over and there was not so much as a single scarlet droplet on the leaves in the pleasant woods where it had ended and the Sword of God was wiped clean again—ready again.
Through the leafy, tranquil decade of the twenties he had wandered among the river hamlets and the mill towns of Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana doing God’s work quietly; without fuss or ostentation. Perhaps it was his very indifference to being caught—his inability to imagine that anyone would even want to interfere—that kept them from ever nailing him for anything but the car theft in Parkersburg that had sent him to the state penitentiary. Sometimes he found his widows in the lonely-hearts columns of the pulp love story magazines. Always widows. Chuckling, pleasant, stupid widows who would want to sit alone with him on a dusty, bulging davenport in a parlor not yet aired free of the sickly-sweet flower smell of the dead man’s funeral. Fat, simpering, hot widows who flirted and fluttered their eyelashes and fumbled for his hand with plump fingers still sticky from the drugstore chocolates; soft corpse hands that made him retch and hold himself in while he turned to the powdered face and smiled and spoke of the provident God that had brought them both together. And afterward there was the little roll of money; money to go forth and preach God’s word among a world of harlots and fools.
Wandering the land he preached. He would take a room at the cheap depot hotel where the drummers sat out the long summer twilights and watched for the evening train and after a bit he would spread the word that he was in town and get himself invited to preach at a meetinghouse and presently he would announce a big open-air revival by the river for the last week in August. It never brought him much money. But it helped him spread God’s glory. God took care of the money. God brought him widows.
His name was Harry Powell but everyone called him Preacher and sometimes that was the only word he would scrawl in the smudged hotel registers. Spring always found him back in Louisville because that was the town of his birth and because with the burgeoning of the ripe season upon the river he liked to feel his whole spirit come alive with holy rage and hatred of the spewing masses of harlots and whoremasters he saw in the crowded April night streets in that swarming river Sodom. He would pay his money and go into a burlesque show and sit in the front row watching it all and rub the knife in his pocket with sweating fingers; seething in a quiet convulsion of outrage and nausea at all that ocean of undulating womanhood beyond the lights; his nose growing full of it: the choking miasma of girl smell and cheap perfume and stogie smoke and man smell and the breath of ten-cent mountain corn liquor souring in the steamy air; and he would stumble out at last into the enchanted night, into the glitter and razzle-dazzle of the midnight April street, his whole spirit luminous with an enraptured and blessed fury at the world these whores had made. That night in his dollar hotel room he might crouch beneath the guttering blossom of the Welsbach flame above the brass bed and count his resources and think to himself: Time to go out again and preach the word? Or is it time for another one? Is it time yet, Lord? Time for another widow? Say the word, Lord! Just say the word and I’m on my way!
And then like as not he would hear God’s voice in the haunted, twitching boards of the hotel hallway; above the giggle and whisper and soft, wet fumble on the creaking bedsprings of the room beyond his, the gagging of the drunkard over in the bathroom by the stair well. Down in the night, in the Louisville streets, the April tinkle of the cheap music and the coarse night voices were not loud enough to drown out his God’s clear command.
Once he had nearly been caught, though it is not likely that he knew how close he had come to it nor would have cared much had he known. He had been solicited by a prostitute along Frey’s Alley in Charleston, West Virginia, and had followed her into the house and, smirking at the madam, paid his money and followed the girl up the steps past the roaring, rollicking player piano, and when the girl had lain back upon the worn gray spread and wearily awaited him, her jaws not relinquishing even for this brief business the gum between her teeth, he had merely stood watching, smiling, his eyes alight with the Glory of God.
Well?
Well what?
Don’t you want it?
He said nothing, his head bent a little, one eyelid fluttering almost closed, listening, harking. God was t
rying to say something and he could not quite hear the words.
You paid your money. Don’t you want it now? Say, what do you want, mister?
He had his fingers around the bone hasp and he was already fumbling for the button that held back the swift blade but God spoke to him then and said there wasn’t any sense in bothering. There were too many of them. He couldn’t kill a world.
But the knife had been halfway out of his pocket before God had finished speaking and the girl’s short, hoarse screams had brought a big Negro handyman up the steps and he had been kicked and beaten and thrown out into the alley among the cats and garbage pails. Another night he had taken a young mountain whore drunk to his room in a cheap boardinghouse in Cincinnati and she had passed out naked on the bed and he had taken out the knife and stood by the bed with it unopened in his hand for a while, looking at her and waiting for the Word and when it did not come he pressed the button and the steel tongue licked out, and, bending by the bed on the worn rug, he delicately scratched a cross in the girl’s belly beneath the navel and left there with that brand so frail and faint upon the flesh that it did not even bleed; and when she woke in the morning alone she did not even notice it, so lovingly and with so practiced and surgical a precision had he wrought it there.
The faces troubled him at night; not with remorse but with self-rebuke at the imprecision of his arithmetic. Were there twelve? Or was it six? Was this the face of the gaunt, boney India Coverley from Steubenville or was it the other one—her ancient, senile sister Ella that he had had to kill because she had surprised him burying the old woman in the peach orchard behind the barn. The faces ran together like the years; like the long rides in the yellow-lit railroad coaches through the clicking river midnights as he wandered from town to town. Lord, won’t I never settle down? Lord, won’t you never say the word that my work is done? Another one, Lord? All right, Lord!
And he would plunge into the lonely-hearts column again or search the faces at a church picnic and when he came to the right one, the one the Lord had meant for him all along—he knew. Then they arrested him for stealing that Essex in Parkersburg and sent him to the state penitentiary for a year and the fools never even knew that the pair of cheap cotton gloves in the glove compartment had belonged to the one that everyone had made such a fuss about because it was in all the papers: that Stone woman in Canton, Ohio—the fool with the two children that had been so much trouble because the girl had been so fat and hard to manage on the stairs that night. But the Lord sure knew what he was doing, all right. He had sent him to the state penitentiary to this very cell because a man named Ben Harper was going to die. A man with a widow in the making and ten thousand dollars hidden somewhere down-river. Maybe this would be the end of it, then. Maybe after this one the Lord would say: Well, that’s enough, Harry Powell. Rest now, faithful servant. Build thou a temple to praise my Holy Name.
He was tired. Sometimes he cried in his sleep he was so tired. It was the killing that made him tired. Sometimes he wondered if God really understood. Not that the Lord minded about the killings. Why, His Book was full of killings. But there were things God did hate—perfume-smelling things—lacy things—things with curly hair—whore things. Preacher would think of these and his hands at night would go crawling down under the blankets till the fingers named Love closed around the bone hasp of the knife and his soul rose up in flaming glorious fury. He was the dark angel with the sword of a Vengeful God. Paul is choking misogynistic wrath upon Damascus Road.
The day they came and took Ben Harper up to the death house Preacher stood screaming after him, his knuckles white around the shaking bars of the cell.
Ben! Ben, boy! It ain’t too late, boy! Where, Ben? Where, boy?
But Ben Harper did not call back. The game was over.
—
Bart the hangman lighted his pipe. He stood puffing and waited as the footsteps of his comrade rang closer down the cold, wet bricks of the prison courtyard. The other said nothing while Bart stamped his feet and shivered. They looked at one another for a moment and then moved through the prison gate into the deserted street. They walked in silence under the winter trees.
Any trouble?
No.
He was a cool one—that Harper, said the man in the old brown army coat. Never broke—game to the end.
He carried on some, said Bart the hangman. Kicked.
But he never told, did he? said the other.
No.
What do you figure he done with it?
I never talked with him, said Bart. But I figure he was a feller that wasn’t used to killin’—a good sort at heart, what I mean to say. I figure he done it and what with being shot in the shoulder and half scared to death at what he had done he just went to pieces and throwed it all in the river.
Ten thousand dollars! In the river? In times like this, Bart? Aw, come off it! Ain’t no man ever got that scared!
Well maybe not. But whatever he done with it he took the secret with him up there tonight when we dropped him.
It began to rain suddenly, like tears: a soft, thick river rain that blew in gusts from the dark hills around the valley. Bart the hangman and the other prison guard hurried up Jefferson Avenue toward their homes at the edge of the town.
They say he left a woman and two kids, said the man in the army coat.
I never heard, said the hangman, bitterly. My old woman’s sister knowed the girl’s mother, continued the other. She was a Bailey from Upshur County. Good country folks, Mabel says. And for that matter I never heard nothin’ ornery about his folks. Lived in Marshall County for three generations. River folks.
The hangman hurried on a little, uncomfortable at this discussion of the family and affairs of the man he had just killed. And yet he knew of no reasonable way of silencing the man in the army coat.
Wonder what gets into a feller to make him do such a thing. I declare, this Goddamned depression has turned up the undersides of some mighty respectable folks, Bart! Yes, Yes.
I was talking to Arch Woodruff here a while back. He’s captain over in that new block where they first had Harper. Arch says his cellmate was a short-termer from down in Wood County—feller folks call Preacher. Arch says that Goddamned preacher liked to talked poor Harper’s ear off—hounded him night and day to get him to spill it—what he done with all that money!—kept hollering after him even when he was up in Death Row.
He paused and thought about it a while. Bart moved on through the rain in silence.
I be dogged if I wouldn’t take a sniff after that money myself if I had me a lead to go on! Well anyways this short-termer—this preacher feller—he’s gettin’ out next month. I reckon he’ll go huntin’ after it with the rest of the hounds.
How about his missus? muttered the hangman. Don’t she know nothin’?
Nary nothin’! cried the man in the army coat. He wouldn’t tell a livin’, mortal soul!
Can’t say as I blame him.
Why?
Well just look where it put him tonight—all that money!
They parted at the corner and the hangman walked wearily up the wooden steps under the naked winter sycamores toward the cottage with the light in the parlor window. His wife looked up from her darning when he came in and rising, moved toward the kitchen.
I hope your supper ain’t dried up, Bart, she said. I’ll go heat up the coffee.
Bart was hungry as a wolf. It always shamed his soul: the vast and gnawing hunger that consumed him the nights after hangings. He hung his wet coat and cap on the antler in the hallway and tiptoed up the stairs to the bathroom to wash up. He could not remember whether he had washed his hands that night after work. At any rate, they seemed cleaner as the bitter, lemony smell of the glycerine soap touched his nostrils and he dried them briskly on the coarse towel. Through the open doorway to the bedroom he could see the sleeping forms of the two children on the big brass bed by the window. He was very quiet as he tiptoed into their room and stared down at the yellow curls o
f the two little girls asleep on the long bolster. It had stopped raining now and a cold winter’s moon had moved into the night’s arena. The pale light shone on the sleeping faces of the children. Gently, Bart the hangman adjusted the bright quilt which covered them, pulling it down an inch or two so that the edge of the quilt would not cover their mouths, so that the crisp white sheets would not touch their throats.
Now eat! cried his wife when he sat at the table and tugged his napkin from the thick silver ring which bore his name. It’s been waitin’ since ten o’clock.
Bart sat for a moment staring at the napkin before he tucked it into his stiff collar and seized the fork.
Mother. Sometimes I think it might be better for us all if I was to quit my job as guard and get my old job back at the mine!
The gray-haired woman sat back suddenly in the straight chair and laid two fingers alongside her pale lips. It was a dread thought.
Yes mom, he said, with his mouth full of the boiled cabbage. I sometimes wish I was back under the hill at Benwood.
And leave me a widow after another blast like the one in ’24? Not on your life, old mister!
He ate in silence, chewing his food slowly and heavily, his face clouded over with speculation.
I don’t wish to be no widow! cried his wife again. With them two growin’ kids to raise!
No woman does, he said.
After a moment he rose and went to the pump and bent, searching for something.
Where’s the laundry soap, Mother? I forgot to wash up.
—
Three weeks after Ben Harper’s hanging Walt Spoon gave Willa a job waiting on tables and counter at his little ice-cream parlor at Cresap’s Landing. The job paid five dollars a week plus meals. The Spoons needed no help. It was a kindness. The first morning Willa left for work she fed the children their breakfast and told John there was lunch in the pantry—corn-bread and a stone pitcher of cold milk and some leftover sausage. The children watched at the window as Willa walked the short stretch of river road to the Landing. John was gravely and silently dubious of the entire business.
