Teeftallow/Chapter 17

WHILE the Irontown Dispatch adopted this rosy view of a very untoward episode, Mr. Perry Northcutt did not follow any such slippery ethical practice. The state of his village lay, as he told his fat wife, Nannie, on his heart.

One night at the Irontown bank Mr. Northcutt remained in the building after a directors' meeting, thinking what to do about the moral state of his town. The directors' meeting had been a success. The board had decided to call on Railroad Jones for further security, and Mr. Northcutt knew this would be impossible for the magnate to advance. It seemed to Perry that the railroad was ripening, like a plum, and when it fell he meant to catch it. In fact, this request for more security was a very gentle shake at the plum tree itself.

So the banker sat at the directors' table, musing his projected coup, when his thoughts veered around to the immoral depths to which Irontown had fallen. Being a man of action, he drew pen and paper to him and indicted this letter to the Reverend Blackman at Big Cypress. It ran:

Dear Brother Blackman

I am writing to ask you to hurry up your appointment in Irontown. We need a revival here right now. The new railroad has brought a disturbing element in our midst and the law is unable to control them. Nothing can help us but the blood of Christ upon the heart of Irontown. I ask you as a lover of lost souls to cancel any other appointment you may have and come on at once. Our streets are lined with drunks; crap games go on everywhere; our young girls are subjected to indecent remarks. The other day our town was disgraced by a shot-gun wedding. We soldiers of the Lord have got to break up these wicked practices. Sometimes I ​almost despair, but I know that the grace of God encompasseth all things. But you must come at once.

Our collection for a two-weeks' revival seldom falls under $300.

Your brother in Christ,
Perry Northcutt.

In the course of a few days came an answer to this very sincere letter setting a date for the meeting and enclosing circulars to be distributed in the village. In a few hours all the store windows in Irontown held posters showing the picture of a hard-faced man with a Bible in his hand, and below the picture was the catch line, "Keep the Devil on the Jump." Then came press notices:

"A power for good."—Smithtown Herald.
"Reverend Blackman cleaned up the bootleggers in our town in a red-hot revival of three weeks' duration."—Banksville Express.
"Reverend Blackman, the Big Bertha of Heaven, blasted hell out of Goodlettsville."—Goodlettsville Inquirer.

Appended was a list of the topics on which the Reverend Blackman would preach:

"The Dance Evil, or Foxtrotting to Hell."
"Evolution, or From College to Damnation."
"Novel Reading, or From Print to Perdition."
"Scarlet Women and Dingy Men." (For men only.)
"Bobbed Hair and Bobbed Morals." (For women only.)
"There Is a City Not Built with Hands." (Farewell sermon.)

When these posters appeared in a flutter of anticipation set up in Irontown. In the meagre intellectual and emotional life of the hill country these annual revivals occupied the place filled in more liberal communities by the theatre, the symphony, the lecture, the fashion show, and the church. The only glimpse the hill folk ever received of philosophy, æsthetics, literature, science, art, and metaphysics was given them by such travelling revivalists as Blackman. However, the preacher touched these topics in a negative way; he spoke of them only to condemn them; to discourage any ​further thought or investigation of the subjects. Any human interest beyond the acquisition of money and how to please God by doing moral and spiritual works was derogated.

The posters stimulated Irontown to activity. The women came to clean out the village church; the choir began practising assiduously; every young man of the neighbourhood hastened to establish an entente with some girl because to enter religious excitement alone was dull entertainment. Human beings entered Heaven as the animals did the Ark, in pairs. The garage oiled up its automatics. Mr. Biggers, the druggist, who habitually consumed his own morphine, prepared to attempt once more to conquer this vice during the excitement of the protracted meeting; and queer to say, he could dispense with the narcotic as long as the revival lasted.

It would be difficult to put into words what the protracted meeting meant to Mr. Perry Northcutt. He did not drink, smoke, or curse. His wife was fat and obstinate. He compressed his whole emotional outlet into an annual protracted meeting. Mr. Northcutt went about his spiritual preparations for the revival with a concentrated earnestness. He prayed almost incessantly. He fasted two whole days. At the end of the second day, while praying in his home, he felt God stroke his thin hair and say, "My son, your faith shall be rewarded by the greatest revival Irontown has ever known."

He rushed out and told his wife, who received it with a sort of stolid credulity, but the miracle got scattered abroad through the town, and everyone realized that God was going to perform a mighty work in Irontown.

The first services of the revival found all Irontown wending its way to the church. The house itself was a large bare building as uncompromisingly cubical as a box. At one end of the room stood the pulpit, a square wooden pedestal painted white and topped with a large gilt Bible. Behind the pulpit, as a queer relic of vanished archiepiscopal ​glories, stood three tall Gothic chairs made of black walnut. What part these chairs ever played in rite or ceremony, what prelates once occupied these great seats, neither the preacher nor any of his congregation knew. That information had vanished from the memory of the people after a century of isolation among the hills.

The church filled rapidly—the church members choosing the front seats, the unconverted taking places near the door. These two bodies merged near the central row of seats. A little later came a concerted movement as the choir went forward to the stall on the right side of the pulpit. A pale village girl took her place at the small reed organ. She screwed the stool around to its proper height, then conferred timidly with the song leader as to what songs should be used. The two laid out the music on the organ desk while everybody in the congregation leaned forward to get a song book out of the rack on the back of the seat in front of them. Then the organist began swaying from side to side, pumping the organ with her feet, and the instrument set up a dolorous wailing. Audience and choir then lifted a queer nasal cacophony of song. When it was finished the Reverend Blackman arose from the central chair behind the pulpit, came forward in the midst of a spreading quiet, laid his own worn leather Bible on top of the big pulpit Bible, adjusted the lamp wick to suit his eyes, then for several moments stood looking at his congregation with a long melancholy face. Then he read his text of how Pharaoh hardened his heart, and after the reading, nodded at the banker who sat on the front seat and said, "Brother Northcutt will now lead us in prayer."

A strong gratified tremor went through the banker as he, and the greater part of the congregation, slipped out of the seats and knelt beside them. In the rear of the church a number of sinners merely leaned their heads over the backs of the next seats, and one or two contumacious spirits refused to bow at all but sat bolt-upright.

Mr. Northcutt began his prayer in a conversational tone but gradually became more vehement until near the end he ​was shouting at the top of his lungs. He picked up the preacher's text, after the manner of an experienced deacon, and prayed that all the men and women in Irontown would not harden their hearts to the sweet impulses of the spirit. "O God," implored the cashier in a loudening voice, "help us not to harden our hearts! Help us to come to your altar like little tender-hearted children and bless us and save us!" [Interruptions of "Amen! Grant it, Lord" from the minister.] "You know we are sinful, Lord, You know we are steeped in wickedness! All of us are, but I pray especially for the young men of Irontown! They are sowing their wild oats, O God, and what a harvest they shall reap! They lie heavy on the hearts of their mothers; and they lie heavy on our hearts, too, O God! Save them from their sins!" ["So be it! Grant it, Father"!] "Keep them from a sinner's hell!" ["Do that, Lord, oh, save them!"] "And God, we have a man in our midst whose heart we pray for you to move. He doesn't believe in you, God! O, it's a pitiful thing for a son not to believe in his Father!" ["Help him believe!"] "It's A. M. Belshue, Lord; Belshue would be such a good man, Lord, if he could only come to you as a little child comes to his father! He's a money-making man, Lord, a moral man, but no man can be saved through his own works, but only by the precious blood of Christ!" ["Amen! Amen!"] "And there is Tobe Sanders, who kain't keep sober, and Caly Stegall, who bootlegs liquor, and my own brother-in-law, who has a secret sin he can't overcome. Help him, Lord! Put your great arms about him till he gains strength to be a man!" ["O, Lord, help Perry Northcutt's brother-in-law."] "And there's the boys in the garage, shooting craps, telling smutty yarns, using your name in vain; help 'em get rid of these dirty, filthy, indecent ways! They're good boys at heart, but their eyes are blinded by their wanton youth!" ["O Lord, what a blindness!"] "Help them; help us all, we need it. We are your feeble children. Do not destroy Irontown; save us, save our nation, save our President, we ask in the name of our blessed ​Redeemer, Amen." ["Amen! God grant it; Blessed Master!"]

Came a sliding noise as the congregation got to their seats again. Mr. Northcutt had tears in his eyes and he wiped them without any concealment. The minister said, "Number fifty-four," and nodded at the choir leader. The pale girl at the organ flushed slightly, then began swaying back and forth pedalling, and the next moment the little reed organ broke into a harsh unmusical prelude which somewhat resembled a gigantic snoring. As the prelude ended, came a pause; the choir leader began beating time, and the choir of untrained voices, never quite together, several a little off pitch, arose in chorus. Certain nasal voices gave the whole volume of sound the effect of having sharp edges, but the effective feature of the hymn was the exaggerated beat of its time. Mrs. Roxie Biggers, who sat in the seat nearest the organ, marked this tempo with a sharp bobbing of her gray head. The bass voices accented it with a monotonous tum-tum-tum. Every long vowel was stretched out into a pounding polysyllable. The song ran:

The effect was a hammering on the tympanum which later in the meeting would produce clear-cut hypnotic effects.

The audience heard this first drumming with a foretaste of the fuller frenzy to come. The banker's eyes brightened as he was about to plunge into his annual orgy. Others dreaded it. Still others looked forward to it with a sense of high entertainment. Yet everyone in the village, except Belshue, sincerely believed that what would follow would be a miraculous manifestation of God's power. They prayed earnestly for this thing to happen.

When the singing was over the Reverend Blackman came ​to the pulpit, repeated his text, and immediately began a long string of dismal anecdotes which related the tragic results of sinners hardening their hearts. Each tragedy had happened within the preacher's own knowledge.

He said that while he was holding a meeting in McMinnville, Tennessee, a beautiful girl had felt impelled by the spirit of God to come forward and join the church. But she had said to her mother, "No, Mother, not right now; just wait till after the Country Club dance, and then I'll give my soul to Jesus. Just one more dance."

"Brothers and sisters, just one week from that night I buried that poor girl in the McMinnville cemetery, and the mother was the most heartbroken woman I have ever seen. She cried over her daughter's grave, 'Oh, if Lucille hadn't waited—if she hadn't hardened her heart!'

"Brother Northcutt, I remember I was holding a revival in Lonoke, Arkansas, and the most brilliant member of the Lonoke bar, a young man, in the best of health, felt the influence of the Holy Spirit moving him to come to the altar and give his life to God, but he put it off, hardened his heart. I begged him to go. He said, "No, Brother Blackman, I'm going to make the race for the Arkansas legislature, and a man can't be a Christian and get elected in Arkansas. Just wait. After this race is over I pledge you I'll come up here and give my life to God.'

"My friends, he never did come. Just three months after that night, I happened to be in Lonoke again, and I was called to the bedside of a dying man. It was that young lawyer. He was a drunkard, dying of delirium tremens. As I held his head in my arms, with his last gasp he moaned, 'Oh, Brother Blackman, if I had only listened to your warning!'—He had hardened his heart."

For some hour and a half the minister rehearsed an endless succession of tragedies, all, he averred, from his direct personal experience.

In reality Reverence Blackman had culled these stories from "Gunther's Handbook for Ministers," but this fact ​had no moral bearing whatever. He was telling the stories in the only moving way a man can tell a story, as having happened to himself. And then, no rational man could ever believe that the minister went about the country sowing death and destruction in his wake. No, he was simply telling moral allegories which pointed to the future and not the past. They were an artistic foreshortening and simplification of life, and the Reverend Blackman stood squarely within his rights as an artist to employ this realistic touch.

Then, right in the midst of these harrowing tales, came a sudden cracking of pistols outside the church. The women, already wrought up by the tragedies, began shrieking. The men leaped up ready to rush out and identify the miscreants. But the preacher held up his hands and shouted, "Brothers, sit quiet and watch the power of God!"

The next moment he picked up the pulpit lamp and strode down the aisle to the church door. He stepped out into the night and help up the lamp so he was in full illumination. At such an unusual outcome the firing ceased.

"Brothers!" cried the preacher, "bring your pistols into the church and use them for the glory of God! Long ago the Lord said unto David, 'Make a great noise for the glory of God!' Maybe our Lord meant pistols? I don't know, but anyway quit using them in the service of the devil and bring 'em to God! Come on in. You're welcome, pistols and all—nobody will report you. We love every one of you out there in the darkness of your sins. Get right, brothers, come on in!"

The Reverend Blackman walked back into the church holding his lamp high and waving his arm for all the world to follow him.

None of the garage gang really followed him, but the sport palled; only one or two more shots were fired; feeble affairs. The preacher had out-dramatized them.

The enthusiasm in the church was immense. The relief from the firing was accounted a miracle. A little old woman ​in black named Abigail Wendler began shouting, clapping her hands and crying, "Praise God! Bless his name!"

No one paid any attention to Mrs. Wendler. She was always the first to shout at the protracted meetings, but some person observed that they were certainly going to have a great meeting, as sister Abigail usually didn't shout till about the third night.

Indeed, when the service was over all the congregation filed out with the sense of a great victory stirring in their hearts. Mr. Northcutt squeezed the fat arm of his wife and said:

"What did I tell you, Nannie? I felt God stroke my hair just as plain as I feel your arm, and he spoke to me and said, 'Perry, my son, this meeting will be—'"

"Yes, you told me that before," interrupted Nannie, who required a very fresh miracle from Perry to hold her interest at all.