Strivers Row (City Of Fire Book 3) by Kevin Baker

Author:Kevin Baker [Baker, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Historical
ISBN: 9780060955199
Google: uKPplwEACAAJ
Amazon: 0060955198
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-01-23T08:00:00+00:00

His rare good mood lasted only until he got home. He had hoped that his visit to The Mansion might sustain him in trying to write his sermon again that night, and he had wanted to tell Amanda all about it, the way he had always told her about everything. But the more he thought about it, the more pathetic it sounded to him— like he was trying to impress her, bragging on himself to make up for his failures in the pulpit, and on that train so many weeks ago. For once she misread his mood and did not try to draw him out, but moved quietly around him, letting him have the room and the quiet that she assumed he needed.

Was this what it would be like with children? he speculated. Always tiptoeing around Daddy? Himself becoming an evermore withdrawn, remote figure, battling with his own demons?

Not that her circumspection did him any good with his sermon, either. He soon found himself bogged down again—distracted, trying to find some way to put a new rhythm to the old words. Working futilely over the old, familiar themes, used again and again until he was sick of even thinking upon them. The Balm in Gilead, and a Song of Zion. A knock at midnight, and the Good Samaritan, and the fiery furnace—and Jonah in the belly of the whale.

He was still unable to understand why his father had named him such a thing in the first place. Milton always insisting it had come from the old slave song, sung by the people he had rescued when they finally crossed the Potomac. After they had knelt and prayed in gratitude, then made their way across the river into the North, singing as they went—

He deliver Daniel from the lion den,

Jonah from the belly of the whale, And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace,

And why not every man?

But his father’s explanation had never seemed sufficient for the onus he carried around with a name like Jonah. It weighed on him like a millstone, its burden only greater the older he became. He knew that the diaconate had almost denied him his father’s pulpit on the basis of it alone and he still heard, sometimes after services, one or another of his congregation insolently whistling that other tune as he went through the door. The one his sister had taunted him with—

My hard luck started when I was born

Least so de old folks say.

Dat same hard luck been my bes’ frien’

Up to dis very day . . .

For I’m a Jonah, I’m a Jonah man . . . “Jonah was bad luck only because he wouldn’t do God’s bidding,” his father had tried to explain—as slowly and carefully as he tried to puzzle out all the terrible, vindictive things God kept doing in the Bible.

“He was afraid to!” he had said. “An’ the Lord saw to it that Jonah was swallowed by the whale—”

“Yes, yes, I know!”

He understood all that, even as a child.

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