Aubrey's Vigil excerpt # 3

          


            It rained about all day on the twelfth of September in the hills surrounding Bertram.  The clouds moved off toward late afternoon, leaving everything wet and cold; the roads slick, hillsides glistening darkly green.   The Wednesday night prayer meeting at the Beulah Baptist Church began at six promptly like every Wednesday.  They sang some. The Reverend Waters delivered a short sermon.  The Reverend Rupert Jones rose and spoke about the dignity and rights of the Negro as a citizen of the United States.  He talked about recent occurrences throughout the nation concerning Negro rights.  It was somewhere during the tail end of his talk that the congregation first heard the whoops and hollers, the rumble of automobiles and the sharp crack of guns being fired. 

            Four automobiles, men hanging from the windows, came down the main street of Blackbottom, shotguns and pistols brandished.  Someone bore the Confederate bars and stars, flapping wildly in the draft of the automobiles.  They were drunken to the man, in high spirits, but the terms of their shouting were hateful as they roared down the narrow street, making as much noise as possible with their guns, car horns and throats.   Negroes on the street scattered at their first pass; were gone by the time the caravan made the block and came roaring back again.  Folks peeked out through the cracks of doors or the edges of their shades.

            At Beulah Baptist, they ran to the windows and watched them pass.  The second time around the automobiles pulled up hard in front of the church.  The men fired their shotguns into the air; waved their flag.  Shouted and cursed.  Folks inside the church locked the large front door, settled down below the windows.   Brother Jones appealed for calm as he stood among the worshippers. Brother Waters initiated a prayer.  Everyone down, praying softly but urgently while Rupert Jones went to the front window.  He watched two shadowy figures leave the first car, carrying something between them.  They planted it in the sparse church lawn.  In an instant it was ablaze, a fluttering yellow fire in the shape of a cross.  It was small, hastily built:  the cross piece hung crookedly from the spar.  Brother Rupert got a good look at one of the men as he stood beside the cross, glorying in its light and heat.  He had a bandanna wrapped over his face but, Rupert studied the man's shape in the starkness of the firelight:  the short, solid body, thick neck, close-cropped hair ... and the ears, small, round, sticking straight out from his head.

            A man back at the lead car fired a shotgun and the glass above the front door exploded inside the church.  People screamed, sprayed with glass; hunkered down closer to the floor.  The front door flew open in a burst of light and Rupert Jones was through it.  Out onto the porch.   He stood a powerful shadowed figure in the doorway.

            "This is the house of God!" his voice thundered.  "This is the temple of Jesus!"

            Silence reigned.  Except for the rumbling of the car engines, the crackling of the fiery cross.  One of the men near it sidled off toward his automobile.  The other, the short, thick man stood watching the black figure in the door of the church.  Eye to eye, both men silhouetted by the light behind them.

            "May God have mercy on your soul for defilin' His church," said the Reverend Jones.  "May God have mercy on you."

            An automobile's engine roared full-throttle. It backed straight out onto the street.  The others followed behind.  The man at the cross yelled up at Rupert.

            "You the one need's God's mercy, nigger!  You a dead man walkin'!  You one dead nigger."  He laughed aloud, stabbing the air with his finger as he backed up toward the waiting open door of the last automobile.  The door slammed shut on him and the car sped off into the black Georgia night.

            The old DeSoto made it fine to Piedmont, where John left his daughters with Kay Polk.  It was fifty miles on down the highway from there when the soft punk of an explosion sent clouds of steam streaming out from under the car's big white hood.  John pulled over onto the grassy shoulder of the lonely two-lane.  It was flat, piney country. He was still a good hundred miles from Dallas.  After a time he was able to lift the hood, releasing a billow of steam and he could see the damage that had been done; relieved to find that the replaced water pump didn't appear to be the cause of the malfunction.

            He felt a presence near him and lifted his head from under the hood.  There was a raggedy pick-up truck pulled up behind the DeSoto with three dogs in the bed.  They began to bark when they spied John.  An old man with shaggy hair and beard sat behind the wheel, watching John through the windshield.  He made no move to get out of the truck.  He tapped his knuckles on the back glass and the dogs grew silent.  John walked back to where he sat.

            "Hello there, sir," said John.

            "Troubles?" asked the man.

            "I think it's just a busted heater hose.  I pro'bly can fix it with some tape I got in the trunk.  But I need some water to refill my radiator."

            The old man flung the door open and climbed out of the truck.  The dogs jumped down and followed him over to the DeSoto, giving John a good sniffing on the way.  His clothes were as dirty and raggedy as the pick-up truck.  He stuck his head under the hood to look things over for himself.

            "It's right there," said John, pointing to the tear in the hose.  "See it?"   Up close, the old man stank strongly of sweat, dogs and cigarettes.

            "My place is down the road a piece," said the man.  "Let's tape her up an' I'll take you there an' git you some water."   As he turned to face him, John was shocked to see that the man wasn't old at all, maybe in his late thirties.   His filthy condition made him appear old, his hair matted and tangled, the lines of his smudged face caked with dirt.

            "I'd be much obliged," said John.

            The old truck rattled along the highway at about fifteen miles an hour, the dogs roaming the bed of the truck.  The man was in no hurry.  He lit up a hand-rolled cigarette and offered one to John.

             "No, thanks," said John.  "My name's John Aubrey," he said, offering the man his hand.

            "Cyril Rodgers," said the man. 

            "I'm mighty grateful to you for stoppin'.  An' to the good Lord for sendin' you my way."

            Cyril turned toward John, his eyes wide with mock surprise.  "The good Lord sent me?  You mean it was the Devil who busted your radiator hose?  Or was it the good Lord?"  John was surprised into silence. "I believe it was the Lord," said Cyril.  "He's always up to some mischief.  I wonder why He done it."  John couldn't think of a thing to say.  Cyril laughed at him.  "Where you headed?" he asked.

            "Dallas."

            "You a preacher, ain't you?"

            John's eyebrows shot up.  "How'd you know?"

            "Soft hands, pasty skin; fancy clothes, but drivin' a beat-up ol' car ....  What you goin' to Dallas for?"

            "I'm speakin' to a conference of pastors."

            Cyril took a long draw on his cigarette.  "Would that be the one put on by the Reverend Harris T. Black?"

            "My God, who are you?" John blurted out.

            Cyril looked him over curiously.  "Maybe I'm an angel from heaven," he said.  He burst out with ragged laughter at the look on John's face.  "You been visited by angels before, ain't you, Brother Aubrey?"  He laughed again.  Sucked on his cigarette.  "I was a preacher once," he said.

            "What happened to you?" asked John.  Cyril exploded into laughter again, bent against the steering wheel, bangin' his fingers on the dashboard.  The dogs in back started barking and he rapped on the back glass to quiet them.  "I'm sorry," said John.  Cyril's laughter turned into a coughing fit.  John kept a wary eye on the road as the truck weaved across the center stripes.  Cyril pulled it back in line. 

            "What happened to me?" said Cyril.

            "Did you lose your faith?"

            "No," said Cyril.  "I found it."

            "I don't understan'."

            "No, you don't.  You a preacher.  You live by words.  Words never tell the truth, Brother Aubrey.  God’s too vast to fit into anybody’s mouth ... or their ears."  And, as if to emphasis his point, he clamped his mouth down tight.  The truck rattled along for a ways.  John searched uneasily the piney roadsides for the sight of a house or a storefront.  Nothing but thick woods beyond the littered, overgrown shoulders.   Cyril spoke again.   "When I quit preachin', I started listenin'.  When I started listenin' all the words dried up in me.  I stood mute before the Lord."  He stared at John, stomped down the clutch, the engine sputtering, the truck slowing down. 

            He turned onto a dirt trail that led deep into the piney wood.  John was startled to see three crosses of rough timber stuck up in a clearing to his left.   The two lesser crosses were raw wood, but the center cross was painted red and bore a Bible verse in white paint:  Eli, Eli, la-ma sa-bach-tha-ni?

            "My God, My God.  Why hast thou forsaken me?" quoted John.

            "Yes!" said Cyril.

            There was another cross coming up on John's right made of pine logs, tied at the crux with rope.  Three more on his left, white, painted with verses.  And then the old truck turned a corner of thick pines and there stood before John hundreds of crosses, clustered in random ways, various sizes and colors.   They stood in front of, and to the side of a one room shack, the exterior walls of which were covered with roofing shingles of many different colors.  The roof itself was corrugated tin, rusted a dark brown.  Smoke rose from a stack jutting through it.  Cyril cut off the truck motor.  John sat gaping at the crosses.         

            "I don't preach no more," said Cyril, quietly.  "I make crosses." 

            "It's wonderful," said John.

            "It's the Lord's work," said Cyril, as if he expected a challenge from John.

            "'Course it is," said John.  "Can I look aroun'?"

            "He’p yourself," said Cyril, his manner withdrawn and apprehensive.  "I'll fetch a couple of pails of water."

            John wandered among the crosses; in the shadows of crosses, many of them full scale, some the size of grave markers, all stuck in the weedy, hard, dry scrabble of central Texas.  The dogs walked leisurely along side him.  Some of the crosses had scripture carved or painted on them.

                         For I was hungered and ye gave me meat.

                         Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour

                        wherein the Son of man cometh.        

                       

                        And many false prophets shall rise.

            Cyril came back with two buckets of water.  They rode back to the DeSoto in silence.  Cyril seemed chary of discussing the crosses.  John was overcome.  No words came to mind.  What the man did was somehow self-explanatory.  John felt the presence of God on that patch of land, inside that old dog-smelly pick-up truck, hidden within the dirty, ragged covering of Cyril Rodgers' soul.

            They filled up the DeSoto's radiator with water.  When John cranked the motor, the tape held.  He shook Cyril's hand, parting there on the shoulder of the highway.  Thanked him once again.  Cyril loaded his dogs back into the truck, was preparing to climb in himself when he turned a last time toward John.

            "What happened to me, Brother Aubrey," he shouted above the noise of the two idling motors, "was God put out His great big ol' thumb an' He squashed me with it.  I'm under the thumb of God, Brother Aubrey.  That's all I'm tellin'."  He climbed into his truck and drove away.