Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

They pulled up and backed around to the door of the new church and several men stepped down from the wagons, blistered men, men of sorrows and men held in contempt, men in washed overalls and starched white shirts, men who didn’t know how to read or had never held in their hands any other book but the Bible, if that, men who took the long view that the Lord was waiting for them in heaven, these men, who Delvin was thinking of and had been thinking of now since last night when he watched the last of them come through the parlor of the Home and stop and stare down at the unrefabricated dead boy, the illuminated and beaten but not destroyed boy, standing in a moment of capacious silence that in itself stood for four hundred years of isolation among men — he had thought of these men who had hardly ever known an unbullied moment in their lives but who went on anyway, wondering what they believed in those nights in the country when the last lamp had been put out and they lay beside their narrow wives in the dark that was of a blackness impenetrable by human eyes as skeeters and fleas and flatbugs went about their cunning business, wondered if they thought of anything at all — these men helped unload the burden and carry it into the church.

Those who hadn’t gotten a chance to view the body in town got one now. There was rustling and whispering and fresh bursts of tears, and voices cried out, making hollow despairing sounds against rafters and roof. After a while an old man in shirtsleeves held off his wrists with black silk garters began to play a large nickel-plated accordion. “There Is a Balm in Gilead” was the first selection, and then Delvin didn’t pay attention because he was harried by nervousness concerning the poem he was supposed to recite. Mr. Oliver was busy with the family. Many cousins and uncles and aunties and brothers and sisters in the Sunday clothes they had worn just three days before at services in this building. A small black stove in the center of the floor was draped in blue cloth and a basket filled with daisies and meadow rue and daylilies set on top. The windows along the sides had been raised and Delvin could smell the dry, rusty scent of new cotton in the fields. A pale green damselfly, elegant and hesitating as it came, drifted in and floated over the assembling congregation. With the paddle fans taken from a box by the door, women fanned themselves vigorously. The fans had advertisements for the Constitution Funeral Home on one side and a color picture of a beautiful sloping tree-shaded field bordering a quiet river on the other.

The place grew warm, and the people, already exhausted, coming off little sleep and the work of their home lives, leaned back on the music for support of a weariness that never really left them.

Delvin, standing next to the open window through which a lazy green fly buzzed slowly back and forth, looked out. Beyond the little ragged graveyard, now rife with fresh flowers amid the undersized gravestones and ceramic urns and worked wire markers, was a big hickory-handled plow with ponderous coulter leaned against a pine tree. He wondered why it was there and wondered what it would be like to plow a field. Beyond the plow the great expanse of cotton hung heavy with hard green bolls.

Now the minister, a deeply black portly man in a black suit with vest and a soft gray tie, ascended the three plank steps to the altar and took a seat in one of the big cypresswood chairs behind and to the side of the pulpit. He was followed by a thin young man in a brown suit who sat down in a similar chair on the other side. The choir had come quietly as ghosts through a door at the side of the church and was now sitting in two short rows farther back on a low platform behind the ministers. They began softly to sing. The accordion that had been playing steadily, the rangy musician pumping, never stopping once to wipe the sweat running down both sides of his face, stopped. The choir sang about how it was going to cross over into campground. Out the big open windows the leaves of the sweet gum soughed and sighed and squared themselves and shook in the breeze that barely reached the floor of the church. Crickets sawed their legs. The bob-white cry of quail. Without Delvin realizing it the service had begun.

The minister gripped the pulpit, thanking everybody for coming and giving the title of a hymn, “Uncumbered Grace.” In a light sweet voice he began himself to sing a line that was picked up by the choir. The congregation sang the line back to them and so the hymn followed: a line sung by the minister and choir and repeated by the congregation. Then another hymn, this time “The Ship of Zion,” sung by everybody together.

As the last phrase died out the minister stepped to the side of the pulpit and kneeled. In his hands was a large white handkerchief stained rusty brown in places. The preacher raised the handkerchief in both hands and began to pray.

“This bit of cloth, Lord, was found in the pocket of the young man before us today. It is a handkerchief given to him by his auntie for his birthday this last May. Casey carried it with him everywhere and used it to wipe the sweat of life from his face. But night before last he didn’t get the chance to use it. Life had already been stolen from him before he could.”

The preacher, who had been twisting the handkerchief in his two hands, raised it again. Many in the crowd had lifted their eyes and were looking at the handkerchief. A rusty tail fluttering in the warm breeze. A woman gasped. Another groaned.

“Blood from this boy’s body stains this hankie, Lord. Casey didn’t have time and the occasion was not propitious for him to draw this square of cloth. Those who kindly cut him down found it in his one unburned pocket. Now this memento belongs to his mother. She will not wash the blood from it.”

He held the handkerchief in front of his face, and Delvin thought for a second that he was going to wash his own face in it. But he didn’t.

“Heavenly Father,” he said, his hands trembling slightly, making the handkerchief flutter, “you have sanctified this blood by your own sacrifice. You too lost a son. A son who washes us all in his own blood. You too grieved. As we here are grieving. This blood, as the blood of any child does, mingles with the blood of the Savior. We here are all sinners, Lord. Fools and strayers, wayward, bumbling folk. This young man whose body lies here before us is cleansed now of all that. He lives with you in heaven. Have mercy on us here, us strugglers and sinners, those left behind in this cold world. Forgive us our sins that we can’t keep from committing. Wash us, Lord, in the blood. Wash us in the blood of the lamb. Heal us, Lord. Hear us. We cry out to you in our grief.”

He lifted his head as cries of Amen and cries of Thank you , cries of Jesus is Lord filled the sanctuary. The minister got to his feet with the ponderousness of a large man and staggering slightly took his stand, entered the pilothouse of his pulpit. He grasped the front rail as a captain would grasp the wheel of his gale-tossed ship. His raised face seemed lashed by a windy force. He looked out over the congregation, in his deepset eyes a sad fondness.

“There is much I could say about this Casey today. When he was a boy of twelve I baptized him in the tank out behind the church. I watched him play at the edge of the fields and I watched that play turn gradually into the work of a man. He used to have a little one-shot rifle that he carried with him into the woods and he was a mighty hunter with it. I could tell you stories all day long, as many of you could tell stories to me.” He turned slightly so that he was half facing the young man sitting in the other cypresswood chair. “But I want to let this young gentleman up here beside me get up now and talk to you. He is the uncle of this boy, arrived last night from Nashville. Reverend Arthur Wayne is his name. He is a preacher himself and has asked to speak to you this afternoon.”