The Leatherwood God eBook

“Nancy,” her brother turned solemnly upon her, “as sure as I’m standing here I don’t care for that any more.  If you say the word, I’ll go and tell Laban to come back to you.”

“You’re safe there, David.  If you’ve parted with your conscience, I’ve got it from you.  I wonder you don’t go and follow after Joseph Dylks too.  All the best and smartest men in the place believe in him.  Just look at Mr. Enraghty!  A man with more brains and book learnin’ than all the rest put together; willin’ to be the Apostle Paul because Joseph Dylks called him it, and gets up in the Temple where he used to preach Christ Jesus and Him crucified, and tells the people to behold their God in Joseph Dylks!  There’s just one excuse for him:  he’s crazy.  If he ain’t he’s the wickedest man in Leatherwood, the wickedest man in the whole world; he’s worse than Joseph Dylks, because he knows better.  Joseph is such a liar that he could always make himself believe what he said.  But it’s no use your stayin’ here, David!” She suddenly broke off to turn on her brother.  “If you’re a mind to let Jane come, I’ll try what I can do with her.”

The old man faltered at the door.  “Are you going to tell her, Nancy?”

“I’m not going to tell you, whether I am or not, David!”

Her words began harshly, but ended with his name tenderly, pitifully uttered.

She called after him as he moved from her door, heavily, weakly, more like an old man than she had noted him yet, “I’ll talk to Jane, and whatever I say will be for her good.”  She watched him out of sight from where she was working; then she went to the door, with some mind to call more kindly yet to him; but he was not to be seen, and she went back to her ironing, and ironed more swiftly than before, moving her lips in a sort of wrathful revery.  From time to time she changed her iron for one at the hearth, which she touched with her wetted finger to test its heat, and returned to her table with an unconscious smile of satisfaction in its quick responsive hiss.  In her movements to and fro she spoke to the baby, which babbled inarticulately up to her from the floor.  Then she seemed to forget it, and it was in one of these moments of oblivion that she was startled by a sharp cry of terror from it.  A man was looking in at the door.

X

The man stood with one foot on the log doorstep outside and the other planted on the threshold of the cabin.

Nancy came toward him with her iron held at arms’ length before her.  “What do you want?” she demanded fiercely.

“Give me to drink,” he said, with a grin.

“Go round to the well,” she answered.

The man bent his body a little forward, and looked in, but he did not venture to lift his other foot to the threshold.  “Where is your husband?” he asked.

“I have no husband.  What is it to you?”

“‘Thou sayest well ... for him whom thou now hast, is not thy husband.’  You don’t look a bit older, and you’re as handsome as ever, Nancy.  I suppose that’s his,” he said, turning his eye towards the little one on the floor, lifted by her hands half upright, and peering at him, in conditional alarm.