Project Purple

28 - The Preacher

"Louder, Bob-It's selfish to serenade oneself," the men jibed back in May as they plopped maize seeds into pointy little mounds.

'The angels watching over me.

The demons held at bay

I wake to a love-filled room

I'm safe throughout the day'

"It's a song my mother taught me when I was little," Robert said, "It comes from the old country."

"Those demons ever get you?" the Buckskinner asked.

The Preacher would not dignify the comment.

But as the weeks progressed, Robert fell into serious reflection concerning the buckskinner's impudent question: How well did he hold his demons at bay?

His deliberations began with the misfortunes of the Goatwench: Her punishments were largely inequitable, but he couldn't protest-though there was, as with most things under the sun and stars, debate about the proper course of her rehabilitation.

But then the horrific death of the Cowleech, and the trepidations; the near revolt that ensued. After that he felt like he had lost the reigns of any control; so many things were wrong, so much had become just plain irrational.

His poor servant's skin was healing, or so he thought, from the cat 'o nine tails whipping. But afterwards, she had slipped into some distant darkness, doing her chores carelessly, laboring once more in August over the fundamental things she had mastered in June. Her emotional and psychological condition began a marked and baffling deterioration, and he was fearful for.

When approached, she withdrew from any intercourse.

"Pleae take my bed, Henri. I'll sleep near the stove."

She refused, out of some drunken obstinancy, to yield the ground she had been assigned. After the lashing she had spent a few nights in the bed of the Bibliothecary, but then Robert woke to find her again next to the unlit stove in the foul dirt.

He felt helpless, watching her condition worsen, knowing that nature showed a callous indifference to the weak.

Robert felt himself to be a good and pious man.

"I am guilty of wearing blinders, possessing an ardent certainty of the truth," he once confessed at the pulpit during Sabbath, "and this dogged sureness hinders empathy, hinders recognizing the turmoil in others."

The poor Badger, the only Jew in the colony, took regular bashings for what a few of the others were calling the 'whole holocaust hoax'. And what infuriated Robert the most was their genuineness-the Buckskinner, the Matron, the Sayer, the Woodcutter-They really wanted the lone Israelite to see the gentile light.

He could feel the young man's gaze-a look which once held so much goodness of heart; one which would most surely triumph over evil. But then, after the summer's debacle under the Magnolia, the Badger looked at him with accusation. Why? Such outlandish rumors they were making, all because of some sanctioned ale.

"It was a celebration, for crying out loud," he bemoaned at the Freeman's meeting, as if this was justification enough.

It was about that time the Preacher's humming stopped, and he never sang again-though the insinuations of something tawdry and ungodly continued. It wouldn't go away because they didn't want it to go away; their organizers were playing puppet master with their spirits.