ELEVEN

In the years after that I moved between the Great Lakes and the Gulf, north in the summer, south in the winter. I traveled by back roads and hiding in freight cars along with a lot of others, because those were the bad years when work was hard to find. A day here and a week there, and that was all. And I came to see in those years how few of the righteous there were. For every railroad bull who would turn his flashlight on you and tell you to hide better or go away peaceable there were ten who would drag you out and take you to the judge so that you would do thirty days on the road gang. And for anyone who would open the back door and give you something to eat there were ten who would set the dog on you. But after a while things got better so there wasn’t so much need to trust to the righteous. And when the war came there was work enough for everybody, so I could live again in the sweat of my face.

The job I got was a steady one with the Bargeways Company out of Pittsburgh. There were twenty or more barges to a tow, all lashed together and pushed by a big towboat between Pittsburgh and New Orleans, and I tended the barges upriver and down, three weeks each way and a four-day layover at Pittsburgh and New Orleans so that the new tow could be made up. Sulphur and salt, steel and oil were what we carried, and we went along the Mississippi to Cairo and then east along the Ohio to Pittsburgh and back again.

On the tow I did my work right and read the Book and minded my own business, being steady and sober and having little to do with any man, so I had a good name with the company. But when I had the four days to myself in town I would waste most of my money getting drunk, because then for a little while I could forget I was accursed and that when I died I would be thrown into the Pit. And wasted the rest of my money in places where women showed themselves naked, because my manhood had been taken from me and that way I hoped to find it again. But I didn’t. And even drunk I could feel the time passing and the Day coming. I saw the hair on my head and body turn gray, but no sign came to me telling me how I might save myself.

Then one day the sign came. On that day we tied up at New Orleans and next to us was an old barge, and on its stern I read words that made my blood run cold, so that I didn’t know what to do. Voorhees Number 7, Brooklyn, New York, they said, and to everyone else on earth they might be just words, but to me they cried aloud, and the number written among them was my number. It was a sign sent to me, and when I looked at it I smelled blood and tasted it and felt my hands wet with it, but when I held them up they were clean. Yet I knew they were not.

So I went on the barge. And I said to the hand there, “I know the Voorhees’ yard. You’re a long way from there, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said. “The barge is, but I’m not.”

“Well,” I said, “what’s she doing here?”

“What do you think she’s doing here?” he said. “She works along the Gulf between here and Mobile. But not for long. Next spring the company’s bringing her back to New York for keeps. They had five more like her down here since the war, and she’s the last of the lot. They got all the rest of them back up there now, and in six months it’s bye-bye baby for this one, too.”

“You going with her?”

“Me? What would I want to do that for? I hear tell winters are cold enough up there to freeze your ass off. Man, I don’t need the job that bad.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Did they get a man yet to fill it?”

“Not with so much time to go. Why? You looking for the job?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It’s a one-way ticket,” he said. “Once you’re up there they won’t pay your way back here again. If that don’t worry you none, come around in six months and see the agent. Last week in March that is. Slip him twenty bucks, and you’ll be in like Flynn. There ain’t many others looking for a one-way ticket like this.”

He would have talked more but I wanted to be alone so I left him and went ashore. And when I stopped in front of the bar across the way I was given strength not to enter it, such strength as I had not been given since I was last in Samuel Fisher’s house twenty-eight years before. And I turned away rejoicing and walked away from it. And kept walking until I was out of the city and on a road that went by shacks and farms with only niggers there. And then the road became a track going through swampland, but I kept on my way looking neither to the right nor to the left, but rejoicing and trying to understand what the sign meant. I walked that way for two days and two nights, never eating or drinking anything in that time, and then my strength failed me and I fell down on the road. And while I lay there I heard a noise like thunder and saw a glory of lights like fireworks around me, and Ithuriel came to me for the first time.

And he said, “Do you believe?”

And I said, “I believe.”

And he said, “Then go with the sign,” and he left me.

So I knew what I must do. For six more months I stayed on the job with Bargeways, and I did not waste any of my money or spend it, but put it into a money belt that I wore against my skin, and at the end of six months it was still there, along with the gift money the company gave me when I told them I was quitting. That way I knew I had enough and more to pay back Samuel Fisher for the money I had stolen. Then he would forgive me and lead me on the road to salvation, because he was the only one who could.

That is what I thought when I hauled the lines aboard the Voorhees barge and we moved out toward Gulf waters. But Satan wars with the Lord. He wrestles with him and he throws him down. Whatever means there are to use against the Lord he uses. There are no means beyond him, even to putting me in the hands of a tugboat captain who was blind to shoal water.

That was how I was turned aside from my course and delivered to Mooney’s Key and the woman there. She came before me, and I saw that her breasts were round and heavy, and her arms and legs smooth and shapely, and beneath her clothes the white flesh of her buttocks showed, and her face was the face of Jezebel, and then my manhood came back to me. The flesh rose and stood erect and I was helpless before it.

So all the money went to buy her in marriage. Yet when the time came to know her as a wife, I would not. I fought with the flesh which is the Satan in me, and I would not give in to it.

For the Book said, Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids.

So I turned away from my wife who was Jezebel and sent to tempt me. Yet because she was Jezebel who had known many men, she found a man to lay with her.

In that time when I searched for Samuel Fisher, walking the streets day by day until I would be led to him, I closed my mind to the woman and the man and how they were sinning against me. I closed my mind to everything but the search. And then because I had done right I was led to him. I stood outside a printer’s shop to rest and saw in the window a card among others, and with Samuel Fisher’s name on it, and underneath it said Fine Cabinets and Picture Frames, so I knew he was the one.

And I went to him and he opened his door to me and when I saw him I knew the words of the Book were true.

For it said, His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire.

And he sat and listened to me while I talked, holding my hand all the while the way he did with Berry in the hospital, and I told him how the sign brought me back to him and about the money and the woman.

And he forgave me.