“Not take out that pillar!” said Andrew Hill. “Ah,” said the minister, “I'm afraid that wouldn't do. It would seem like—”
“I wouldn't move that pillar if the whole town was sidin' with him.”
“Oh, now—”
“Not while I'm alive. Adam Wick, he's obstinate.” Mr. Hill shut his mouth grimly.
“Religious! Humph! Maybe he is.”
The minister moved away. They were a stiff-necked people, but after all he felt himself to be one of them. It was his own race. He knew how Andrew Hill felt, as if something somewhere within him were suddenly clamped down and riveted. He understood Adam too, in his private pew on the side porch, the hymn-book on the chair, his eyes on Preston Plains steeple, fixed and glittering. He thought, “We don't claim to be altogether lovely.”
Adam was in his own eyes without question a just man suffering injustice. His fathers in their Genesis and Exodus had so suffered, faced stocks, pillory, the frowning edge of the wilderness, and possessed their souls with the same grim congratulation. No generation ever saw visions and sweat blood, and left a moderate-minded posterity. Such martyrs were not surer that the God of Justice stood beside them than Adam was sure of the injustice of that pillar in that pew, nor more resolved that neither death nor hell should prevail against the faithfulness of their protest.
And the turkey strutted in the yard, the chickens hurried and peeped, the thunder muttered at intervals as if the earth were breathing heavily in its hot sleep.
The church-bell rang for the end of the morning service. It floated up from the distance, sweet and plaintive.
Adam rose and carried the cushion, chair, and hymn-book into the house.