The Quickening | Page 4

anxious seat." Was it really his call? Or was he only scared?
The twelve-year-old brain grappled hardily with the problem which has
thrown many an older wrestler. This he knew: that while he had been
listening with outward ears to the restless champing and stamping of
the horses among the pines, but with his inmost soul to the burning
words of his uncle, the preacher, a great fear had laid hold of him--a
fear mightier than desire or shame, or love or hatred, or any spring of
action known to him. It was lifting him to his feet; it was edging him
past the others on the bench and out into the aisle with the mourners
who were crowding the space in front of the pulpit platform. At the turn
he heard his mother's low-murmured, "I thank Thee, O God!" and saw
the grim, set smile on his father's face. Then he fell on his knees on the
rough-hewn floor, with the tall mountaineer called William Layne on
his right, and on his left a young girl from the choir who was sobbing
softly in her handkerchief.
* * * * *
June being the queen of the months in the valleys of Tennessee, the
revival converts of Little Zoar had the pick and choice of all the
Sundays of the year for the day of their baptizing.
The font was of great nature's own providing, as was the mighty temple
housing it,--a clear pool in the creek, with the green-walled aisles in the
June forest leading down to it, and the blue arch of the flawless June
sky for a dome resplendent.

All Paradise was there to see and hear and bear witness, as a matter of
course; and there were not wanting farm-wagon loads from the great
valley and from the Pine Knob highlands. Major Dabney was among
the onlookers, sitting his clean-limbed Hambletonian, and twisting his
huge white mustaches until they stood out like strange and
fierce-looking horns. Also, in the outer ranks of skepticism, Major
Dabney's foreman and horse-trader, Japheth Pettigrass, found a place.
On the opposite bank of the stream were the few negroes owning Major
Dabney now as "Majah Boss," as some of them,--most of them, in
fact--had once owned him as "Mawstuh Majah"; and mingling freely
with them were the laborers, white and black, from the Gordon
iron-furnace.
Thomas Jefferson brought up memories from that solemn rite
administered so simply and yet so impressively under the June sky,
with the many-pointing forest spires to lift the soul to heights ecstatic.
One was the singing of the choir, minimized and made celestially sweet
by the lack of bounding walls and roof. Another was the sight of his
father's face, with the grim smile gone, and the steadfast eyes gravely
tolerant as he--Thomas Jefferson--was going down into the water. A
third--and this might easily become the most lasting of all--was the
memory of how his mother clasped him in her arms as he came up out
of the water, all wet and dripping as he was, and sobbed over him as if
her heart would break.

II
THE CEDARS OF LEBANON
Thomas Jefferson's twelfth summer fell in the year 1886; a year
memorable in the annals of the Lebanon iron and coal region as the first
of an epoch, and as the year of the great flood. But the herald of change
had not yet blown his trumpet in Paradise Valley; and the world of
russet and green and limestone white, spreading itself before the eyes
of the boy sitting with his hands locked over his knees on the top step
of the porch fronting the Gordon homestead, was the same world which,

with due seasonal variations, had been his world from the beginning.
Centering in the broad, low, split-shingled house at his back, it widened
in front to the old-fashioned flower garden, to the dooryard with its
thick turf of uncut Bermuda grass, to the white pike splotched by the
shadows of the two great poplars standing like sentinels on either side
of the gate, to the wooded hills across the creek.
It was a hot July afternoon, a full month after the revival, and Thomas
Jefferson was at that perilous pass where Satan is said to lurk for the
purpose of providing employment for the idle. He was wondering if the
shade of the hill oaks would be worth the trouble it would take to reach
it, when his mother came to the open window of the living-room: a
small, fair, well-preserved woman, this mother of the boy of twelve,
with light brown hair graying a little at the temples, and eyes remindful
of vigils, of fervent beseeching, of mighty wrestlings against
principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world.