The Quickening | Page 5

"You, Thomas Jefferson," she said gently, but speaking as one having
authority, "you'd better be studying your Sunday lesson than sitting
there doing nothing."
"Yes'm," said the boy, but he made no move other than to hug his knees
a little closer. He wished his mother would stop calling him "Thomas
Jefferson." To be sure, it was his name, or at least two-thirds of it; but
he liked the "Buddy" of his father, or the "Tom-Jeff" of other people a
vast deal better.
Further, the thought of studying Sunday lessons begot rebellion. At
times, as during those soul-stirring revival weeks, now seemingly
receding into a far-away past, he had moments of yearning to be wholly
sanctified. But the miracle of transformation which he had confidently
expected as the result of his "coming through" was still unwrought.
When John Bates or Simeon Cantrell undertook to bully him, as
aforetime, there was the same intoxicating experience of all the visible
world going blood-red before his eyes--the same sinful desire to slay
them, one or both. And as for Sunday lessons on a day when all
outdoors was beckoning--

He stole a glance at the open window of the living-room. His mother
had gone about her housework, and he could hear her singing softly, as
befitted the still, warm day:
"O for a heart to praise my God!"
and it nettled him curiously. All hymns were beginning to have that
effect, and this one in particular always renewed the conflict between
the yearning for sanctity and a desire to do something desperately
wicked; the only middle course lay in flight. Hence, the battle being
fairly on, he stole another glance at the window, sprang afoot, and ran
silently around the house and through the peach orchard to clamber
over the low stone wall which was the only barrier on that side between
the wilderness and the sown.
Once under the trees on the mountain side, the pious prompting
knocked less clamorously at the door of his heart; and with its
abatement the temptation to say or do the desperate thing became less
insistent, also. It was always that way. When he was by himself in the
forest, with no particularly gnawing hunger for righteousness, the devil
let him alone. The thick wood was the true whisk to brush away all the
naggings and perplexities that swarmed, like house-flies in the cleared
lands. Nance Jane, the cow that did not know enough to come home at
milking-time, knew that. In the hot weather, when the blood-sucking
horse-flies and sweat-bees were worst, she would crash through the
thickest underbrush and so be swept clean of her tormentors.
Emulating Nance Jane, Thomas Jefferson stormed through the nearest
sassafras thicket and emerged regenerate. What next? High up on the
mountain side, lifted far above Sunday lessons and soul conflicts and
perplexing questions that hung answerless in a person's mind, was a
place where the cedars smelled sweet and the west wind from the
"other mountain" plashed cool in your face what time a sun-smitten
Paradise Valley was like an oven. It would be three good hours before
he would have to go after Nance Jane; and the Sunday lesson--but he
had already forgotten about the Sunday lesson.
Three-quarters of the first hour were gone, and he was warm and thirsty

when he topped the last of the densely-wooded lower slopes and came
out on a high, rock-strewn terrace thinly set with mountain cedars. Here
his feet were on familiar ground, and a little farther on, poised on the
very edge of the terrace and overtopping the tallest trees of the lower
slopes, was the great, square sandstone boulder which was his present
Mecca.
On its outward face the big rock, gray, lichened and weather-worn, was
a miniature cliff as high as the second story of a house; and at this
cliff's foot was a dripping spring with a deep, crystalline pool for its
basin. There was a time when Thomas Jefferson used to lie flat on his
stomach and quench his thirst with his face thrust into the pool. But that
was when he had got no farther than the Book of Joshua in his
daily-chapter reading of the Bible. Now he was past Judges, so he knelt
and drank from his hands, like the men of Gideon's chosen three
hundred.
His thirst assuaged, he ascended the slope of the terrace to a height
whence the flat top of the cubical boulder could be reached by the help
of a low-branching tree. The summit of the great rock was one of the
sacred places in the temple of the solitudes; and when the earth became
too thickly peopled for comfort, he would come hither to lie on the very
brink of the cliff overhanging the spring, heels in air,