Simple Honorable Man by Conrad Richter

Author:Conrad Richter [Richter, Conrad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5020-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Rock Past Finding Out

Johnny tried to make out his father.

Once long ago he had tried and failed, but then he had been no more than a child sent to the store for a spool of darning cotton. Now he was almost grown, past his sixteenth birthday, and had been on a man’s job in the city. He was experienced enough, he guessed, to see and understand what had been veiled to him before.

Just the same, all the way from the western part of the state he had dreaded the reunion. He was coming back jobless, defeated, a failure like the prodigal son. But if his father felt disappointment or disgrace, he gave no hint of it.

“Johnny!” his hearty voice called, and the black-garbed figure strode across the Wetherill station platform. The boy felt the well-known mustache-tasting kiss. “This is John, my oldest boy,” he introduced him with pride to an older man on the platform. “He’s been working for the Westinghouse Machine Company in East Pittsburgh.”

As the host, he insisted on carrying the battered Donner-family suitcase, now back home again.

“No, no,” he had protested vigorously when Johnny tried to hold on to it. “I’ll have one of my members bring out your trunk. That’s the new Wetherill school up there on Henderson Hill.” On the way from the station he pointed out half a dozen landmarks. If he felt any less warmth for the son than in Mahanoy, the latter couldn’t detect it.

“What do you think of our Pompy?” he demanded, pleased, stopping before an ordinary prick-eared bay hitched to a muddy-wheeled wagon. He stowed the suitcase under the seat and they started out grandly. “You’re now going up Houston Hill,” he announced, calling it “Howston” in the local manner, and later, “This end of Wetherill is called —— town, —— town,” giving the boy a vigorous pinch on the leg before each word and laughing immoderately at his little joke on the name of Pinchtown.

At home Johnny thought he felt confusion in his mother’s eye that he hadn’t “stuck it out,” made good in the city. But his father was in high spirits, especially at the table, relating jovial and even uproarious valley incidents. No one could carry things off like his father. After supper he took the boy across the road where the brick walls of the new church were rising from the ruins. For much of an hour he treated him as someone his own age, confiding all that had happened, pointing out future details of unfinished sanctuary and Sunday-school rooms, describing doors, windows and furnishings still to be.

“I have my text for the first sermon all picked out,” he promised.

The boy heard with strange recurrent sensations. He had forgotten all this. Now he was back again among the old ecclesiastical influences, his ear assailed by the peculiarly dry and sterile vulgate of the church, his young life faced by the stern presence of rituals and sacraments, of vows and austerities, of obligations and constraints, all under the overhanging shadow of the cross.

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