I was not prepared to confound this faulty logic; it was not then the business of small boys to question anything their elders told them, but to accept without comment the pearls of wisdom that fell from bewhiskered lips. But it seemed to me small business for God to be engaged upon. Yet it did not cause me great surprise, for I had long known that the God who pressed so heavily upon Farmington was a conception of unutterable cruelty, an omnipotent Being whose greatest joy lay in singling out the weak and lowly and inflicting horrible tortures upon them, to the vast and gloating satisfaction of the Brothers and their kind.
Some time afterward, because I was worried over this torturing and punishment of the darky whose writhings had now become less an amusing exhibit than a terrible manifestation of the Almighty, I asked another Brother how he knew that God had a hand in it. But neither he nor Uncle Si ever told me. None of them were ever able to tell me how they knew so well what God wanted and what God did not want; they merely left with me the impression that on occasion they walked with God and that God spoke to them and asked their advice on the conduct of the human race. But the source of their information I could not determine.
I have never found anyone who could satisfy my curiosity on this point; I never then, or later, found a religious enthusiast who would admit that he was offering merely his personal interpretation of the utterances that other men had credited to the Almighty. But there was nothing that entered the mind of God that the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters of Farmington did not know and that they could not explain and apply to local affairs. They knew precisely what was a sin and what was not, and it was curious that the sins were invariably things from which they received no pleasure. Nor was anything which paid a profit a sin. They knew very well that God considered it a sin to play cards or dance, but that He thought it only good business practice to raise the price of beans or swindle a fellow citizen in the matter of town lots, or refuse credit to the poor and suffering.
3
As I grew older, and began to be skeptical of what I was told, I became increasingly annoyed not only by the mental mannerisms of these people, but by their physical mannerisms as well. Not only did they walk as if their soles were greased, sliding and slipping about, but they talked as if their tongues were greased also. Their language was oily; they poured out their words unctuously, with much roundabout phrasing and unnecessary language. If they wanted to tell about a man going across the street from the Court House to the Post Office they would take him up the hill past the Masonic cemetery, with side trips to Jerusalem and other Jewish centers. If I went downtown and met a man like Sheriff Rariden, who will always have a place in my affections because he permitted his son Linn and myself to roam the jail yard and stare through the bars at the nigger prisoners, he would say:
“How’re you, Herbie? How’re your folks?”
But if I met a Preacher the greeting was this:
“Good afternoon, Herbert. And how are your dear father and mother?”
And then he patted me on the head, pinched my arm, and padded away, sliding greasily along the pavement, his eagle eye alert for little boys playing marbles or for other signs of sin. He might have been skinny and pitifully in need of food, but nevertheless I thought of him as greasy. He had about him an unwholesome atmosphere; I could not be comfortable in his presence. I felt that he had to be watched, and when I became old enough to understand some of the looks that he bestowed upon the young and feminine members of his flock I realized that he should have been.
I had not lived very many years before I learned to look upon Preachers, and their familiars, the Brothers and Sisters, as useless incumbrances upon an otherwise fair enough earth. But while I hated all of them, with a few natural exceptions, the one I always hated most was the current pastor of our Southern Methodist church. He was my spiritual father, the guardian of my soul and the director of my life in the hereafter, and he tried to see to it that I went into the hereafter with proper respect for him and a proper respect for his God. I had to call him Brother and be very meek and gentle in his presence, and stand without moving while he patted me on the head, asked me fool questions, and told me how much God loved little boys and girls. He called me a “manly little fellow,” which annoyed me exceedingly, and I have the word of my young nephew that small boys are still annoyed by it.