THE next morning, after all Emma’s holding back, before Small Hardy left she bought a piece of red calico for Bonnie. As a result on Sunday, the first Sunday of the year when they had meeting, there was no change for collection. Emma could shake the money gourd all she wanted, pretending that she had expected to find something. The gourd was empty.
“The preacher’ll have to do with our company,” she said half to herself, half to Bonnie and John who were waiting to start out.
John was very impatient. Granpap and the boys had gone long ago. They would be halfway to church. Emma still wanted to treat him as a baby and make him go with her. And the worst of it was the boys would not have him. He looked at Bonnie and saw her pulling at the narrow skirt of her new dress, trying to make it full and handsome.
“Look at Bonnie a-strutting,” he said.
“Let her strut,” Emma scolded. “She’s a need to with her first new dress.”
“Some day,” she told John, “you’ll have new jeans, not patched ones that come from the boys.”
She pulled her knitted black shawl over her head and followed the children up the trail. Bonnie ran on, stepping proudly along the path in her bare feet. The red calico dress with its long tight little waist and narrow gathered skirt looked nice and new.
They walked single file along the trail. Over one hill and down another side—over another higher one and along the ridge leading to Thunderhead. They could see Frank McClure’s place down in the valley. Not a sound there. It was a good three miles away from that point but sound travels a long distance on a clear day. They knew the McClures had gone.
Close to Thunderhead they got into the shade of the early spring leaves. The trail sloped up to the divide over Thunderhead. On the other side of the mountain the narrow sledge road took them zigzag across the steep face of the mountain. All that side of Thunderhead was quilted zigzag by the trail and at the bottom the trail went down between the sides of other mountains like a loose thread a woman has left hanging off the side of a quilt.
All the way down the shut-in they walked by a stream that grew wider toward the bottom. Emma took off her shoes and waded over the stream when the trail crossed, but the children splashed through. Bonnie held her dress so high to protect it from the water, Emma had to call out and make her let it down, for there was nothing underneath. Just below the Martins’ house they crossed the footway, across the branch, and after that it was only a little distance to the road.
The church, a small log building, was up a short trail at the left. Across the road, on a slope, was the burying ground. Emma’s husband and the three children who had come between Kirk and Bonnie were laid away there. There were no flowers in the burying ground. The graves lay flat and plain on the slope. The dead were dead and there was enough to do caring for the living. There was not a woman around that country who did not have one child or more in the ground. When a woman was ripe she gave birth, and if the child died, it did not help much, after the first days of sorrow, to weep. What was done was done.
Sunday School did not last very long. When it was over the women stayed on the benches inside and talked. Bonnie hung around Minnie Hawkins and Sally McClure and some of the older girls. They were near the window and outside stood Kirk and Basil and Jesse McDonald. The boys pretended that they were interested in talk, but the girls knew well enough why they were there.
Bonnie moved up close to Minnie, who was talking to the others in a low voice so the women wouldn’t hear. Ora was eying the girls. She was not sure she wanted her Sally talking so intimately with Minnie Hawkins, though she had nothing against Minnie, not anything she could show. Minnie had a beautiful white complexion. Her blue eyes and black hair made her the prettiest girl around the valley. She was plump where the others were rather skinny. Boys and men eyed her whenever she came into any gathering. And this perhaps was the reason the women did not trust her very much. Then they remembered her mother. But the very fact that the boys and men were interested in Minnie made her more interesting to the younger girls. Ora’s Sally would have followed her anywhere.
Minnie felt Bonnie’s face nosing at her shoulder. She lifted her hand, laid it on Bonnie’s cheek, and not ungently pushed her away.
“This talk ain’t for young ones,” she said. The other girls laughed. Even Sally, who was Bonnie’s own kin, laughed. The little girl went back to Emma feeling left out and disgraced.
The men stood outside in the cleared place in front of the church. John had slipped away from Emma and hung behind Granpap away from the boys, though they probably would not have noticed him since they had plenty to hold their attention. There was a song they had sung after the preacher in church that said:
It was an easy song to remember and half under his breath but loud enough for the girls to hear, Kirk with his hat pushed on one side, perky and insolent, sang softly into the window, which had no panes, but was an opening for light to come in:
Halfway through, Jesse McDonald joined in, singing low like Kirk. Even Basil joined in on the last line. But he kept one eye on Jim Hawkins, who was standing around in front with the other men.
John was giving most of his attention to the boys and he hadn’t heard the men talking. Just then Granpap, who was sitting on a log behind John, spoke out so loud even the boys hushed and listened.
“David danced before the Lord,” Granpap said.
The preacher hadn’t yet come for midday meeting. Hal Swain, because he could read, carried on Sunday School.
“I’m not saying it’s wrong—nor right,” Hal Swain shook his head. “But the preacher’ll be telling us it’s wrong before the day’s out.”
“Like he told us last year and the year before that,” Granpap added.
“And next winter, if it’s a good winter, we’ll be at it same as ever.” Fraser McDonald spoke up from the steps where he was whittling a green Judas tree stick.
“If I thought it was wrong,” Jim Martin, who was twice as tall as his little wife, Jennie, boomed down from where he was standing by the church, “I’d quit. But I haven’t ever seen the wrong. We danced in my cabin last week, and I’m not afraid to say so. My God is a just God and he won’t punish me or my young ones for sashayin’ around some to the music of Granpap’s fiddle and Sam Wesley’s banjo.”
“To my mind,” Jim Hawkins spoke very carefully, “hit’s plumb wrong and lascivious. My gal’s going to stay home with her daddy till her man comes along and takes her in marriage. If she can’t get a man without sashaying around for it, then unmarried she stays.”
There was a silence after Jim Hawkins had spoken. Each man was digging down into himself, holding himself back. Jim Hawkins looked at them defiantly. He knew what was in their minds about his wife. He had found her in the back shed with a fellow who lived under South Range and he had turned the woman out and done nothing to the man. Only he kept Minnie at home, never leaving her at night except for Saturday evenings when he went to the store. And his neighbors went down in their minds remembering all this. But they kept silent.
Granpap broke up the silence. “David danced before the Lord,” he repeated. “And I ain’t ashamed to play before the Lord. He can look and see there’s no sin in my heart.”
“Yes,” Fraser McDonald insisted. “Hit’s what’s in your heart that counts. Some of the round dances I’ve heard tell of are wrong. That’s what you might call lascivious, Jim Hawkins, a-hugging up a woman for a whole dance. But young ones or old ones a prancing around doing a Ladies’ Chain or Do Si Do can’t be harm.”
“There’s the preacher,” Hal Swain said. Preacher Warren hitched his horse to a tree down the slope. He reached in his saddle bags, got out what he wanted, and came along to the door of the church. The men followed him in silently. They sat on the homemade benches on one side and the women and children on the other. Up front there was a table with a pitcher of water and a glass that Sally Swain had brought from the store. Sally took up almost the whole of the front bench, for she weighed over two hundred pounds. Behind the pitcher the preacher laid the big Bible he carried around with him in the saddle bag.
He was a small man from one of the settlements near a church school on the other side of North Range. During May he would come every Sunday and after that only once a month until summer was over. Standing behind the table, he gave out the words of the hymn. For such a little man he had a strong voice and led the singing. First he cleared his throat and hummed down in it to get the key.
“We’ll sing to-day, ‘Come ye sinners,’ ” he said and cleared his throat again. Line after line they sang with him.
Bonnie, who was good at remembering words, did not need the preacher to lay the lines out for her. She could have sung right on, having learned this one the summer before. She had a good voice. John, sitting on the other side of Emma, heard her letting it out. She lifted up her nose and sang right through it. The prayer was a long one, and John was very tired before it was over. He tried to get Bonnie’s attention, but Bonnie held her eyes straight in front. She liked to listen to the sing-song of the words. John was simply not interested in them. There was another song and then the sermon.
The preacher looked down at the Bible, turned the pages over to a place at the front, cleared his throat and with head bent looked impressively from under his eyebrows. He eyed them all, men, women and children, threateningly. It was what he had seen other preachers do down in the towns. And he thought it the right manner to use with a wayward flock.
The text was, “And Abraham said, ‘Here am I, Lord.’ ” He read from the Bible about Abraham being ready to sacrifice Isaac in the land of Moriah on top of a mountain. “And Abraham said, ‘Here am I, Lord,’ when the Lord called him. And the Lord said Abraham must take his only son, even the son he loved, and sacrifice him to the Lord. So Abraham rose up early in the morning and cut wood and took some fire and went to the place he could see afar off, the place the Lord had told him. And up on the mountain he bound his son on the wood of an altar and took up a knife to slay him. But just in time the Lord showed Abraham a ram in a thicket so that Abraham could offer up the ram instead of his son. So the Lord blessed Abraham because he was willing to sacrifice his son that he loved.”
The preacher closed the book with a snap. “How many of you,” he asked, “can say with a clean heart, ‘Here am I, Lord’? How many, while you’re working in your corn patch or sitting by your fire, or while you’re dancing your Chains and Under the Garden Gates can say, ‘Here am I, Lord,’ and feel that for the Lord you would sacrifice anything or anybody, your son or your dancing or your playing?
“There’s one amongst you,” he went on—and waited a moment, looking around at them all. “There’s one amongst you that calls figures and plays the music. He leads the young ones into sin. He’s old, nearing his grave, and ought to know better. Instead of playing for dancing he’d do better making his peace with the Lord.”
Suddenly preacher Warren pointed straight at Granpap. “What will you say, John Kirkland?” He called out in a high voice.
Emma gasped. All heads turned and all eyes stared at Granpap. The old man sat up straight and looked neither to the right nor to the left. He sat there like a rock with his blue eyes narrowed. He looked between the slits at the preacher.
“What will you say,” the preacher repeated, “when the Lord calls you, John Kirkland, John Kirkland?”
Granpap stood up. “I’ll say this” he answered, and John felt the bench under him shake with the sound of Granpap’s big voice. “I’ll say David danced before the Lord and he played on the cymbal and the lute—and if King David could then John Kirkland can. And that’s between him and his Lord. Now,” Granpap said, “John Kirkland’s not a-going to stay and be rebuked before his brethren.”
The preacher’s hand fell to his side. Granpap edged his way past Fraser McDonald and Jim Martin into the aisle and walked to the door. What a meaning there was in the sound of his boots on the floor! How they said to the preacher at every step. “You can’t dictate to John Kirkland—and you can’t disgrace him before his kin and neighbors.”
Everyone was looking at the place where Granpap had gone out of the door. Their heads were turned one way—away from the preacher. Then the heads came slowly around and neighbor was looking into neighbor’s eyes. Emma was not looking at anyone. She wanted to follow Granpap. Must she get up and go with everyone watching? She clasped her hands together and unclasped them, twisting the shawl in her fingers. Her indecision lasied only a second. Almost as soon as Granpap was out of the door she was on her feet.
“Come on, John,” she whispered and taking Bonnie and John by the hands, she led them out of the door.
And a queer thing happened that people talked about long afterward. Kirk McClure got up from the men’s side and followed Emma. The preacher trying not to notice began, “We must be willing to sacrifice like Abraham was willing to sacrifice . . . .”
Not waiting to hear the rest, Ora McClure got up. Frank McClure met her in the aisle and they walked to the door. Behind them came their six children, for Ora had the seventh in her arms. Fraser McDonald came next and his wife. Like cattle going down to the stream to drink, all the others went until only Jim Hawkins and Basil and Minnie were left.
Talking about it afterward, Ora and Emma agreed that this could never have happened at their old settlement where few people danced, and where the preacher was better liked. And the resentment did not last long.
The next Sunday all the folks were back again just as if nothing happened. Basil was there, but the rest of Emma’s family stayed at home.