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Sixteen
- West Virginia University Press
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89 Sixteen The voice had the power, the glory in it. It came storming out of the pulpit, driving through the hot, thick air inside the old brick church, blowing through the open windows and out into the dark, deserted churchyard and off down through the trees. I thought it probably caused ripples on the creek. The people sat on the hard wooden pews, row upon row of sweating faces and bodies, transfixed. The voice slammed into their minds, making their heads seem heavy, their necks hunched into their shoulders. I wanted to get out of there but there was no way I could break loose from where I was sitting without the whole church seeing me. Without Ruth Ella seeing me. And besides, there was the voice. It was the most God-awful, beautiful, wonderful voice I had ever heard. It lashed the Word of God from wall to wall inside the church, whipped the Word across the shoulders and down the backs of the people, cracked it over their heads, a punishment and a burden made heavier by the terrible timbre of the voice. Its sheer force jolted some of them to their feet, drove them out into the aisle and stampeded them, joining them with mindless trampling to the front of the church, there to be rescued from eternal hell, to be pulled back from the very brink of everlasting roasting above the fires of the black universe. To be saved. As the voice went on it grew slightly higher in pitch, now and then wavering a bit, allowing the subtle underpinnings of hysteria to creep through the strength of the performance. The voice flew and dived, sometimes cracked, quivered on the edge of dissolution only to come back with even more power. It roared and 90 purred in the same breath, the same sentence, as it spewed from the mouth of the stumpy, warped, little man with the barrel chest who stomped and strutted back and forth behind the pulpit, his crooked leg and withered left arm flailing, his left eye astray. As he stood on the raised platform he would stare intently at the far side of the church, his face squarely in that direction. But his wandering eye, the left one, would flick across the faces on the other side of the aisle in an eerie, frightening and detached search for unbelievers. His bad leg and the curl of his arm made him walk with a pronounced stoop that brought him even closer to the floor, a fierce gnome clumping back and forth across the wooden platform, dust from the ancient floorboards floating in a thin cloud about his legs. He waved his good arm, keeping his withered one against his chest, using the contrast of the two limbs for maximum effect. But the thing I noticed most about him—besides his voice—was his chest. In spite of his abnormalities, the man’s chest was perfect, so large that it, too, was almost an abnormality. The chest was far too large for a man of his size, a chest that swelled and filled his dripping white shirt and pressed against the little narrow black tie he wore. For some reason I kept noticing that tie. It was longer than any tie I had ever seen, hanging down below his belt, dangling in front of his fly, almost to his crotch. I had never worn a tie. I had seen some, of course, but I had never seen one that long. It must have been made special, just so it could get down over that chest. The preacher wore no coat and that long tie cracked back and forth like the whip of the very devil as he snapped himself across the platform. Abel Hitch enjoyed his work and the sound of his own voice. He pulled the voice from deep inside his enormous chest and the chest sweated. The thin white shirt passed the sweat through to the out- [3.237.46.120] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:28 GMT) 91 side very quickly, giving the people in the first rows a whiff, now and then, of hard-working preacher, undiluted, undistilled. The old platform shook and the pulpit quivered from the stomping of his feet. Behind him, along a low plank wall that stood about chest high, were several straight-backed cane-bottomed chairs. No one sat in them. Heavy drapes, the color of old blood, hung behind the low wall...