Why Beulah Shot Her Pistol Inside the Baptist Church by Clayton Sullivan

Author:Clayton Sullivan [Sullivan, Clayton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Baptist Church, fiction, Southern Baptists, religious fundamentalism, Why Beulah Shot Her Pistol Inside the Baptist Church
ISBN: 9781603060745
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Published: 2004-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

It’s a good thing Sumrall left the house when he did. He hadn’t been gone out of the house five minutes before I heard Ralph drive up in his pickup truck. He parked his pickup in the garage and come on inside the house. Ralph would have gone crazy mad if he’d known Sumrall had come inside the house and helped me to my bed. You ain’t gonna believe this but Ralph come into the house singing. He was singing “Amazing Grace.”

He was singing so loud you could have heard him all the way to Laurel. If I didn’t know better I’d of thought he was drunk the way he was belting out “Amazing Grace.”

“Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,

“That saved a wretch like me!

“I once was lost, but now am found,

“Was blind, but now I see.”

That’s what Ralph was singing at the top of his voice. I thought to myself how odd that was. Or maybe I ought to say weird. An hour or so before he’d beat the stew out of me with his belt. And now he was walking around the house singing a gospel song like nothing had happened.

When I heard Ralph come in I didn’t move. I stayed on the bed where I was. I still had on a dress—the white one with lots of lace which I was wearing when Ralph whipped me. Or as he put it, chastised me. I was hoping Ralph would come back to the bedroom where I was and say something to me. I was hoping he might say, “Beulah, I want to apologize. I shouldn’t have done what I did. Sometimes I fly off the handle when I shouldn’t. So I ask you to forgive me.” Why I hoped he might say this I don’t know. When you stop and think about it, why would I want a man who had just whipped me to say anything to me? That doesn’t make sense. But Ralph didn’t come back to the bedroom where I was. He stayed away from me like I had leprosy or some other kind of gosh awful disease. I heard him take a leak in the bathroom. After he’d taken a leak he flushed the toilet and brushed his teeth.

I heard him walk to the front bedroom and take off his shoes. I heard ’em hit the floor. That’s the way Ralph does. He takes his shoes off one at the time and drops ’em on the floor. He slept that night in the front bedroom. It didn’t take him five minutes to go to sleep. I know what I’m talking about because I heard him start to snore. Ralph got up real early Thursday morning. I heard him wake up Oscar who’d slept on the sofa in the living room. I heard Ralph say, “Wake up, buddy, we gotta go.” Before he left the house he still didn’t say nothing to me. He didn’t come to the bedroom where I was. He just got up, dressed, and left in his pickup truck.

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