The morning after the fight, when we are all at breakfast, the girl Rachel gives me a note and I open it and it’s from Reverend Mather saying I must come over to the church for counseling and guidance after classes today.
Just what I need, I thinks. I look over at Clarissa to see if she got a note, too, but I don’t see her reading one.
“I’m to get counseled and guided by the Preacher today,” I tell Amy.
“I do not envy you, Sister,” says Amy.
I knock on the door of the church and then push it open and enter. It is the main door and it opens on the back of the church, such that one is looking down the central aisle to the pulpit. The Preacher is standing at the pulpit, reading his Bible. I walk down the aisle toward him. I stop and wait, my hands at my sides.
“You will kneel down right there,” he says, pointing to a spot directly in front of him. There is no rug on the polished wood floor and it looks right hard, but I march over to the spot and kneel down.
“You will put your hands in a prayerful attitude and pray silently for fifteen minutes, asking forgiveness for your disgraceful behavior yesterday.”
I put up the hands and close the eyes and pray for deliverance from this place. The knees set in to aching right off, and I find that fifteen minutes can be a long, long time.
“Very well, you may stand,” he says after an eternity of boredom and pain. I climb to my feet and put my hands behind my back and wait for what’s next.
“What have you to say for yourself?”
“I got in a fight and I am sorry for it, Sir,” I say.
“That’s all? That you are merely sorry for having savagely attacked an innocent girl.”
Innocent girl? Clarissa?
“Sir, there was two of us in that fight,” I say. Just look at my face, Preacher, for evidence of that! Innocent, indeed!
“The girl you assaulted is an extremely well-bred young woman of the highest refinement. She would not have willingly entered into combat with you had you not physically engaged her.”
“So you ain’t gonna counsel and guide Clarissa Howe?” I asks, almost gagging with resentment.
“I gave her my condolences and conveyed my concern for what she had been through,” he says. He sets his mouth in a prim line and folds his hands before him. “We prayed together for your salvation, so that you might see the error of your ways.”
I roll back my eyes at the injustice of it all. Please, God, let this be over soon.
“You will maintain a respectful attitude, young woman!” he warns. “Remember where you are!”
“Yes, Sir,” I say, dropping my hands to my sides and coming to attention, my eyes straight ahead.
“That is better,” he says. He looks at me carefully for signs of disrespect, but I let none show. He looks at me for a long time and the silence hangs in the gloom of the church. Presently, he leaves the pulpit and comes down to where I’m standing in the aisle and walks slowly around me. I hold the military posture, but I don’t like him behind me where I can’t see him. What if he should hit me? What if . . .
I’m relieved to see him come back into my sight.
“While I would usually ascribe an incident as occurred yesterday to the hysterical vapors common to the female,” he goes on in a musing way as if he’d been thinkin’ on it a while, “in your case I believe it is different. I believe the sordidness of your early life has affected your judgment, your character, and perhaps even your very soul.”
He goes back up to the pulpit. “We must pray together. Back on your knees.”
Thump.
It went on for hours, it seemed—praying and reading from the Bible and more praying and sermons on evil and sin and me, always back to me, me and my early life, me on the ship, me and how I got here, me and the devil that’s in me till I was dizzy and ready to keel over in a dead faint.
Finally, after one last long prayer delivered with his one hand on my head and the other stretched out toward Heaven, he freed me and I ran back to the safety of my school.