Part 5 (1/2)

”Oh, you know how it is,” she said. She took Ralph's right elbow, jutting out from the crutch. ”Evening, Brother Flood.”

He seemed to consider, then nodded.

When he closed the door Aunt Ella took a quick look in through the window. Already the Preacher's wife Betty Jane was coming from the bedroom, but things were different now. She had on a heavy brown bathrobe and her hair was in pink plastic curlers. It wasn't hard to see Brother Flood was in trouble for sitting up all that while while she was waiting.

Six rods down the road, a third of the way to her own house, Aunt Ella stopped the car and turned off the lights, and Ralph got out. She watched him hobble through the tall gra.s.s and apple trees toward the Preacher's horse-barn, the other side of the graveyard. In fifteen minutes Ralph was back.

”I feel ten years younger,” Aunt Ella said thoughtfully, smiling at her reflection in the cracked winds.h.i.+eld.

”Yes'm,” Ralph said, scrunched down level with the dash, ducking the low roof on his side. The horse had stepped on his good foot, and he believed the toe was broken, which it was.

3.

”There's just no satisfaction,” Aunt Ella said. That was three days later, at Leon's. The baby was sitting on the floor cooing, picking up a soupspoon and putting it down again, and the big part-collie dog was sitting opposite, looking at him with his head tilted and his ears straight up. Ralph sat half-heartedly watching them, the crutches lying in his lap, the broken leg going out to his right, the leg with the broken toe going out to his left. He was sunk in gloom, but sometimes he would remember to lean down toward the child, the muscles of his face contorting with the effort, and say ”Boo!” The child showed a hint of a smile.

Leon said, ”What happened?” He wished Darthamae would come in from the pumps (she was filling up Leonard Avery's dumptruck). He hated to be the only one to hear what Aunt Ella had done. She was Darthamae's relative, after all; he only called her ”aunt” the way other people did, because after all those years of her nursing people and taking care of children while their mothers worked (with Ralph at her heels, forever wailing ”Aunt Ella! Aunt Ella!”) it had turned into part of her name. It was Darthamae's responsibility more than his. She ought to be hearing it anyway, because it was something.

It was the old gypsy pea trick, and if the Preacher had just called in Doc Coombs, the way other people did, and not some real veterinarian from town, it would never have worked. (”The Lord resisteth the proud,” said Aunt Ella.) It ought to have taken at least three days, but the Preacher was hasty as well as proud. The vet gave the horse a shot of tranquilizer, and when he was wiping off the needle, he said, ”I hate to tell you, Reverend, but your horse has gone crazy.” Even after the tranquilizer had taken effect, the horse went on jerking his head up and down and rolling his eyes back, trying to get the pea out of his ear. (”I'd rather have given him spavins,” Aunt Ella said. ”You can run a piece of his tail's hair between the two bones in his foreleg and clip off the ends. You'd swear he was crippled for life, but then you measure up and take that hair out and he's just as good as ever, sometimes improved. That's what I'd done if I wasn't worried Ralph would measure wrong and we'd never find the hair.”) It took the Preacher about fifteen minutes to get down to Aunt Ella and say he'd thought it over and maybe he'd let his horse go after all. He'd had some unexpected expenses.

”Vetinary bills?” Aunt Ella said. Inside, she was jumping up and down with glee. She felt ten years old again. She felt the way she'd felt the time she broke out all the schoolhouse windows, seventy years ago now. After a while she talked the Preacher into driving her up for a look at the horse. He was asleep in the stall-he had enough tranquilizer in him to kill any ordinary horse. The Preacher said he'd been riding him hard all morning. ”Hmm,” Aunt Ella said. She opened up the horse's eye. It could have been perfectly normal, for all she knew. But she squinted at the Preacher and said, ”Well, I can give you twelve dollars.” He looked like she'd knocked all the wind out of him, and for a minute she was sure he'd had a heart attack, and she was going to have some explaining to do to Leon and Cousin Gordon. He said, ”What are you talking about?” She thought a minute, or pretended to (looking up at the new-timber rafters above the stall, and the hay that lay in the shaft of sunlight, as green as dry evergreen boughs). ”Well then, fourteen,” she said. ”I can't stand d.i.c.kering.” He looked like she'd whipped him in front of his playmates. Finally he said, ”All right.” He was so mad he could hardly talk. She followed him into the house and paid him, and that night she took the pea out and walked the horse down to her place and staked him in the yard like a goat.

”Surely you gave the horse back to him later,” Darthamae said-standing at Aunt Ella's elbow now. She still had Leonard Avery's money in her hand.

”Certainly not,” Aunt Ella said. ”I sold him for glue.”

”You what?” Darthamae said.

Leon said, ”A two-hundred-dollar riding horse?”

”I needed the money,” Aunt Ella said, pouting. ”And he owed it to me, for the expense of fixing Ralph's toe.”

”They don't take horses for glue anymore,” Leon said.

”Down at Elizabethtown they do.”

”That's seventy miles.”

”Well, Bobby Hume drove us down in the truck,” Aunt Ella said. ”It was the only decent thing to do. It wouldn't be right to make a profit off it.” She folded her hands.

Darthamae leaned her knuckles on the table. ”Aunt Ella,” she said seriously, ”you've committed a crime. Do you know that?”

”Judge not that ye be not judged,” Aunt Ella said.

”You tell the jury that,” Darthamae said.

But Leon was gazing up at the fan, musing. At last he said, ”And you still weren't satisfied? Aunt Ella, how can that be?”

She slapped the table. ”That man had insurance,” she said. ”Now you tell me, Leon James, would a man that trusted in the Lord go out buying insurance?”

”The Lord helps those that help themselves,” Leon said.

She scowled, the palsy moving her head. ”Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where rust corrupts, and thieves break in and steal.”

”The poor is hated even of his own neighbor,” Leon said, ”but the rich hath many friends.”

”Be strong, fear not,” Aunt Ella said, ”the Lord will come with a vengeance, even G.o.d with a recompense.”

Leon couldn't think of one.

After a minute Aunt Ella said, ”Not only that, the congregation's buying that man a new riding horse. They had a meeting last night. There's no justice this side of heaven.”

”Well now that beats everything,” Darthamae said. She straightened up, shocked (also, she hadn't been informed of the meeting, and she couldn't think who would have done it to her). It was easy to see she was inclining to Aunt Ella's side. The dog was trying to bite off a string from Ralph's cast, and Ralph was wincing. The baby was. .h.i.tting at Ralph's other foot with the soupspoon.

Aunt Ella sat with her hands folded and her lips closed flat. At last she said, ”Well, I got a plan.”

4.

Sunday was the Preacher's hardest day, with two sermons in the morning and another one at night, so at first, above and beyond any suspicions he may have had about Aunt Ella, he wasn't sure he could accept her invitation. She'd thought he might speak of her breaking the Sabbath, but if that ever entered his mind he kept from mentioning it. She liked him for that. There was no surer sign of small-mindedness, in Aunt Ella's opinion, than a love of the letter of the law. His religion had imagination in it: she'd seen that the first time she'd heard him preach. It made your heart light, it was all so fine. When he spoke of the fires of torment it was purest poetry. It was by means of the Preacher's imagination she intended to undo him.

Even though Sunday was his hardest day, he'd decided to come, in the end. As she'd known he would. She'd merely waited him out, sitting at the telephone table with the phone in her left hand and the receiver in her right, looking up over the rims of her gla.s.ses at the velvet sign over the calendar, BLESS THIS HOUSE. She'd said merely, ”You have to harvest the grapes when the Lord sees fit to send them, Brother Flood.” She saw the marker ribbons coming out of the limp old Bible on the table before her and was inspired to add, ”I knew you'd be interested in how we do it, for your understanding of the Lord's Word. But of course it's true, a Sunday's your hardest day.”

She gave him a show. She was out to undo him, but she wasn't going to be small about it. She normally set up the grape press on the kitchen sink and the bottle-capping machine on the kitchen table, but this time she moved the press and capper out to the barn and built a kind of platform for them and nailed up a two-by-four frame around them like a booth at the fair or an immersion closet, to make it all more impressive. When it still looked small she nailed a board against the wall and put hooks on it, and built another little platform and put a washtub on that: instead of using the same straining sack over and over, as anyone would normally do, she'd use ten different sacks and wash each one out and hang it up to dry after every use. It might ruin the grape juice-she wasn't sure-but it made the operation something to look at. He'd appreciate that. Since Brother Flood came to Ebenezer Baptist, the wors.h.i.+p had gotten so complicated they had to write down the directions on a program. After that she swept the barn floor till you could eat off it and brought in a table and some kitchen chairs and some gla.s.ses. The morning of the day the Preacher was to come she drove into Cobden and hired some drunkards from the Appleton Hotel, and then she drove back to teach her Sundayschool cla.s.s and invited the girls to come over to her place right after lunch and join in the grapejuice making. A little after noon, after she'd put them all to work (and shortly after the Preacher had arrived), she got the Preacher to drive her down to Cobden again, for the parable's sake, and hired herself two more drunkards.

When they got back, the place was humming like a hive, and if you didn't know better you'd have sworn it was a real operation. The drunkards were all sweating like they hadn't sweated in three, four years, walking around b.u.mping into each other, slipping into the shade of the burdocks sometimes for a pull at the bottles they'd brought, getting more cheerful and more dignified as the day wore on, sometimes missing the grapes completely and snipping off the vine instead, sometimes tipping their wheelbarrows over or falling off the plank coming into the barn. One of them was already asleep, lying under the wagon in the corner. Two of the girls from Aunt Ella's cla.s.s ran the press, one cranking, one stirring sugar in, and two more ran the capper. Most of the sacks hung on the wall drying, getting bits of straw and cobweb on them. The Preacher's wife sat with Ralph and three of the girls at the table. She had on her white hat and gloves.

The Preacher stopped in the doorway and put his hands on his hips and looked at it all. He still had on his black Sunday suit. He was a happy man. He could understand the drunkard problem. In this day and age, you took what hired labor you could find. When Aunt Ella finished her explanation of the work she gazed worriedly at the four rows of grapevines, picked clean a good half hour ago, and said, ”We may need more men before sunset.” ”Mmm,” the Preacher said. He too was worried. ”I can drive you back to Cobden if you think-” ”We'll wait and see,” she said. And now it was time. She said, ”Shall we try a taste?” He would like that very much. She led him to the table.

The crockery jug stood behind the door, right where she'd hidden it. She caught it up and carried it over to the wooden tub under the press. She turned the spigot. Her hands were beginning to shake again; her head too. At the look of mysterious joy on her face, Carol Ann Bowen, standing by the press, was startled.

She let about two cups of juice run in, then turned off the spigot and swirled the jug a time or two to mix the juice and the gin. She went back to the table and poured a gla.s.s for the Preacher and one for his wife. She watched him taste it, suspecting it tasted like h.e.l.l's last torment, and for a second she was sure it was all up. The Preacher lowered his eyebrows, disappointed, but before he could speak his wife said, ”Say, that's good.” Her gla.s.s was empty. The Preacher took another swallow, and he liked it better this time. ”It waters your eyes,” he said. ”It's not at all what I expected.” Aunt Ella said she wasn't surprised. She carried back the empty jug and filled it with plain juice and poured gla.s.ses for Ralph and the girls and the four drunkards she'd been able to persuade. Then she slipped back into the sheepfold for more gin. When she poured the second gla.s.s for the Preacher and his wife they hardly noticed she was there. The Preacher was speaking slowly and thoughtfully of friends.h.i.+p versus brotherhood. He could say he felt love for Aunt Ella, for instance, yet in all honesty he didn't believe she felt actually friendly toward him, in the ordinary sense. He looked up at her sadly. She would understand what he meant. And yet she could see the position he was in. A man made certain moves, with certain intentions, and these moves had certain results, if she followed his thought....

One of the drunkards who'd been out in the burdocks patted the Preacher's shoulder, leaning on him a little. Things were going faster than Aunt Ella had expected.

”Girls,” said Aunt Ella, ”it's time you all ran home now. You've been a wonderful help, and each of you take a bottle of grapejuice to your mother.”

They thanked her, and in a matter of seconds she had them out of there.

She got more juice for the Preacher and his wife and sat down to observe her work. The Preacher was speaking very slowly, very solemnly, of the difference between the love of G.o.d and the love of man. His voice was loud, and he winced from time to time, making fine distinctions. His wife gazed deep into Aunt Ella's eyes and brooded. She was a pretty child, Aunt Ella reflected. Perfectly lovely in her blue flowered dress, white hat, white gloves. In spite of the make-up, her face was as soft and innocent as a baby's. She was feeling terribly sad, for some reason, and Aunt Ella's heart went joyfully out to her. She smiled, and as if the girl had been waiting for that sign, she spoke.

”Why do they all call you Aunt Ella?” she asked.