Six pages set down now, and Amos aint writ a word about church yet, which is a thing a man notices when the whole county’d swear he’s a heathen if he could keep from braggin about it. This page is dated a Sunday, and the ink is a thin watery blue, the kind a man mixes when the bottle’s run low and he’s too proud to buy more till the store’s on his way for somethin else.
Sunday, February 14, 1904
Ground’s still froze hard and the road to the store’s rutted so deep a wagon leans like a man that’s had a long lunch. Martha made me put on my other shirt and she stood on the porch and brushed the mule dirt off my shoulder with the same hand she’d of swatted a boy with, and she said we was goin to meetin and I could set in the back with the other sinners or I could chop kindlin all afternoon in my Sunday clothes, whichever the Lord and my back preferred. I set in the back. The preacher talked two hours on redemption, and I kept my eyes open the first one so Martha’d testify it to the neighbors, and the second one I studied the crack in the floorboard and counted how many times a man could say grace over a cold stove and still call it supper.
Amos, scratched up the margin where the page is folded: “no man sets in the back of a church on account of his sin. he sets there on account of his back and the price of a good front pew.”
After meetin we walked over to Grissom’s store for the lamp oil Martha said she was out of, and the whole congregation was there spendin tithe money on the same oil and the same penny candy for the same kids, and it come to me a man can hear the gospel all mornin and the first thing he buys with his Sunday dollar is somethin to see by in the dark. Old man Grissom aint been to meetin in three winters, and he took my dollar and made change like a man that’s studied the collection plate with more respect than the book. I asked him did he want to hear how it went, and he said he’d already heard, cause the road past his store gets half the truth and all the gossip by sundown free of charge.
Amos, down at the bottom, the pencil pushed soft: “a man goes to church to get his soul looked at, and goes to the store to get his lamp filled. most men’d be hard put to tell you which one they got more use out of on a cold night.”
Walked home and the sun come out thin and white like it was behind glass, and Martha ruint it all the way on account of my boots tracked in and the oil cost a nickel more than it ought, and I told her a fresh nickel’d buy her a whole afternoon of bein right, so the Lord come out ahead on the deal. We et cold beans and a pone of bread, and the house smelled like the lamp we aint lit yet, and I set by the stove and let the dark come on and thought how a man’ll pay good money all his life just to make a little light in a room that’s only ever been dark when his eyes was shut.
