"She ain't even a sister," retorted our visitor, who had risen and was on his way to the door. "She's never j'ined the church. When somebody named it to her as a duty if she'd repented of her sins she jest laughed and said she wouldn't. Not bein' respectable enough to belong in with church folks she 'lowed she'd stay outside with the wicked where she belonged and not embarrass nobody by settin' by 'em in church. 'Lowed she reckoned she could find enough to do out there instead of 'h'isting herself up with respectable women in the foreign missionary society.' That's the way she talks, Brother Thompson, and there can't nobody stop her!"
Bowtown was an ugly little streaked mountain village that followed the windings of the country road for half a mile and then gave out. The last house was not a house at all, but an old box car. And this was the home of Sal Prout. But she denied that it was a box car, with a hundred fanciful deceptions. First, it was whitewashed within and without; second, it was covered with house vines; third, the dooryard smiled at you from the face of a thousand flowers, like a Heavenly catechism of color. But go as often as we would we never found Sal at home. She was busy with the wicked. She could do anything from pulling fodder to nursing a teething baby, and all you had to do to get her was to need her.
This was how we came to meet her at last. William's health was failing fast now, and he got down with sciatica that spring. He had been in bed a month; the people on the circuit began to show they were disappointed in not having an active man who could fill his appointments, and I was tired and discouraged with being up so much at night and with anxiety for fear William would have to give up his work.
A preacher in our church cannot get even the little it affords from the superannuate fund until he has been on the superannuate list a year; and if he gives up his work in the middle of the previous year that means he must go, say, eighteen months without resources. That is a long time when you have not been able to save anything, and when you are old and sick. So, I was sitting in the kitchen door of the parsonage one morning after William had had a particularly bad night, wondering what God was going to do about it, for I knew we could not expect help from any other source. The agnostics may say what they please, but if you get cornered between old age and starvation you will find out that there is a real sure-enough good God who numbers the remaining hairs of your head and counts the sparrows fall. William and I tried Him, and we know. There were terrible times toward the last, when we never could have made it if it had not been for just God.
And I reckon that morning was one of the times, for as I was sitting there wondering sadly what would happen next, an immense woman came around the corner of the house and stood before me on the doorstep. She was past fifty years of age, and had the appearance of a dismantled woman. Nothing of youth or loveliness remained. I have never seen a face so wrecked with wrinkles, so marred with frightful histories—yet there was a kind of fairness over all her ruins.
"I am Sal Prout," she said, and it was so deep and rich a voice that it was as if one of the bare brown hills of the earth had spoken to me.
"And I've come to git breakfast," she added, spreading peace over her dreadful face with an ineffable smile. An hour later she was in possession of William and me and the parsonage. She was clearing up the breakfast things when she said:
"You looked fagged; go and git some rest. I'll take care of him," nodding her head toward the door of William's room.
When I awakened in the middle of the afternoon he was sitting up against four hot-water bottles, letting her call him "Brother Billy." That sounds scandalous, but listening from where I lay on the sofa in the front room I could tell that they were having a duel of spirits, and that she was taking liberties with William's theology that must have made his guardian angel pale. He wore his red flannel nightshirt, had a quilt folded around his legs and one of Benson's Commentaries open upon his knees. His hair was bristling in fine style, and his long beard lay like a stole upon his breast. His hands were resting on the arms of his chair, and he was regarding Sal, who sat in the opposite corner openly dipping snuff, with a kind of fascinated disapproval.
"The kind of faith you have in God don't do Him jestice," she was saying. "It's sorter infernal—it's so mean and partial. Your God ain't nothing but a Paradise capitalist and aristocrat—the sort of one that fixes up a flower garden for Him and jest His saints to set in the middle of and sing and harp on their harps, while a right smart chance of the best folks sneak and shuffle around in the outer darkness forever because, like me, they had no chance to be good, and so went wrong before they knowed where they were going. Sometimes these last years since I had my vision of Him, I've wanted to tell you preachers that the little ornamental divinity that you shout about ain't nothing but a figger of speech took from the heathens and made over by heathen Christians."