C. Morgan - All the Living

Aloma sat perfectly still, wondering at her sudden feeling of aloneness and what seemed now the oppressive quiet of the small sanctuary. She felt them watching. She averted her eyes so she could not see them at all and she ran her hands silently over the chord progressions of the hymns, her hands shaking slightly.

At five before the hour Bell came inside and he walked up to her at the piano and he was so tall she had to crane her neck back to see him properly. He said, Why don’t you play a bit, to draw em in.

Oh, she said, yes, and rejolted into action, her hands trembling on the keys. But as she pushed beyond the opening bars, her fingers found their old habit of being, and the memory of her muscles drew her mind into the song. Her breathing slowed and she found once again, as she always did, that she had a fearsome control of herself at the keyboard — if nowhere else in the world. From the invitation, she ran straight into the first singing hymn and the congregation rose beside her. Then came her own shuddering response to the sound of their hollered singing, the mismatched pitches rubbing and abrading against one another, the static of imperfect voices. It was not perfection that moved her, only that rub, what others found ugly. She sought the joy of misshapen things. But too soon the clamor was over and with it the noisy anonymity that cloaked her and Bell introduced her to the curious congregation as Miss Earle. She half rose from her piano bench with a forced smile and a heated face and promptly sat back down again, looking to neither the left nor the right but straight at Bell with such intensity that, in that instant, she memorized him.

Then Bell preached. We are all lonesome men, he said and he turned his head down with its black curls, looking like a sorrowful bird with its beak tucked into its chest. And he stayed there for a moment like that, breathing, before he lifted his head again. I one time heard a man say that the human was the lonesomest thing could be read after in the world, that there’s not a animal in the whole animal kingdom with sadness laid on its heart like ours, and I suspect that’s true. It’s a thing we’re all wearied of, each the one of us, this being amongst all the people and ever being alone. Even Jesus was alone in the desert with not but a fool devil to keep him company. Bell paused, breathed, and fingered at his brow, not looking away but surveying them as he took his time. Aloma saw a brief shadow of thought cross over his features.

I been lonesome too — nobody’s immune after the cradle — but I got wind of God from a good upbringing so I knew, even in my dark hour, to reach out. I called up from my earthly crying, brothers and sisters, I called up from the depths and from the selfishness of my own heart and unto Thee I gave myself, that’s the truth. And grace hammered me, it was like my bones breaking, it broke me up, brothers and sisters, and it hurt. Grace don’t always feel like something good. It cut up my heart. Grace’ll come, but don’t expect pleasure when it does. He looked out at them. See, I gave up and submitted my own self, though I didn’t want it, nobody wants it, nobody wants to be a slave. The whole world is fixing to tell us one thing — Live big in the world, take up all the space a body can, feed the body, love first the body. Well, I gave up the body through grace, I gave up my own grave-drove desires though it’s a constant temptation, Lord, it’s a constant temptation to backslide. You know how it is. And they amened, they did know. He was sweating now, stoked like a stove before them, though there was no wildness in him, only will.

But funny thing was, when I gave up, when I submitted — that thing I wanted most not to do — I found I wasn’t half so alone as I was before, even if I am just alone as ever, so far as the world considers. No, not half so alone, cause my heart was turned out like a shirt wore wrong side out, brothers and sisters, that’s how it was when God turned me, so that my innermost heart was all exposed, facing the world and not my own self. That’s the good thing God did when he made me not what I wanted. But I didn’t do it, God did it. I didn’t say, Come in — God said, I’m coming in. All I did was only let him. Yet I had to give up, I had to submit me to something I didn’t want, to the will of another. That’s the opposite of the world, to rub your own self out. World wants you to take up ever more space, brothers and sisters. But God asks us to be less so that others might be more.

He continued, And don’t you know it, once I shut up, once I got my own voice all stilled, then I heard it. Then I heard what it was God was fixing to get me to do, which is preach, which is give. And I got lighter of the spirit, of the body, and I saw our dreams come with many cares. That’s written. My dreams were heavy on my own back. And here’s the thing about God when he speaks, he — Listen, God don’t sound like no coal train come howling down from the driftmouth, God don’t sound like heavy weather, God don’t sound like God. He paused, eyed them, wiped the sweat rolling now from his brow down the sides of his face, grimaced slightly, and smiled. He said, Small, still voice, a little murmur. He held up his hand, two fingers an inch or so apart. He shrugged. I ain’t made it up, it’s written, he said, shaking smally the Bible. Elijah goeth up unto the mountain and in the cave he heareth the small still voice. And that was the voice of God. Ain’t that just… And he laughed to himself, sobered, looked out at them with accusation and a fierce look like love. What do you think that voice says? He waited a moment. Submit, he said, and then a thin woman stood in the center of the church, her flesh whittled by a stingy hand very close to the bone, and she wrapped her knobby hands around the pew in front of her, leaning forward. Her hair fell like a gray curtain over her face. She rocked a little, the man beside her reached up once, patted her on the back, lowered his hands to his own withered lap. Submit unto one another, Bell went on, watching the woman, called her by the name Ellen and she lifted her hands above her head and a few more congregants popped up, hands to their chest or the air. And Aloma found that she could not turn away, not from their standing and undressed emotion or from Bell, who stepped farther out so that he was almost in the first pew and he called more of them in his rising black honey voice, brothered and sistered them by name and held his Bible up higher before him as he called them. And the rolling cadences of his voice urged them on in their own prayers, prayers that leaped from them even as he preached so that their voices joined to his in an upsurging of spoken need, until it became unclear who was preaching and who was listening, but now almost half the congregation stood in an energy she did not recognize and even as it frightened Aloma — their yielding and their babbling — she felt an uneasy joy.

Because she could not help it, she sang all week. She came home from church that first Sunday with a tune in her throat and she carried it with her all day until she lay down with it in bed, though she didn’t realize it until Orren said he couldn’t sleep, she was buzzing like a hornet. But she had put a hand to the piano again and she was glad for it, and if Orren didn’t understand her, she could not make him. What did he care to know of her anyway, with his earthfast disposition, his increasing hours away from her? She petted herself with the idea that she would be fine without his gritting presence. Short of keeping him awake at night, he did not seem to notice the change in her. She had the feeling more and more now that his eyes looked through her, that she was like foxfire, a ghost. And even in bed sometimes she sensed that when he said her name, it was just some strange and misnamed conjuring. When he stiffened inside her and craned his body as if some fever were cresting to break over him and he had to help it or resist it — it seemed like both — with every fiber of his being, she did not always think it was really her he was calling when he called her name. But she held on to him anyway, as if she could save him from his fever by clinging tight, but there was a part of herself now that she kept back.