Like a schoolboy released to his summer, he capered in the garden. He knew how the orator, the actor, felt; what they sought in their success. He could tickle them and they would laugh; he could spank them and they'd howl; he could caress… and sighing, they'd respond. He was an honest preacher at last. Through this thicket, now, he could thrust his stick to stir the soul. It was better, he felt, touching them this way, than all the ways he had imagined would bring on rapture if he had only dared to reach out to employ them, boldly to stare or boldly speak, harshly to grasp and greedily to seize: that knee, for instance, for which he'd known such bitter regret, he might have moistened with his lips while his delicately socketed accompanist pretended that his passion was merely pity for her suffering and gently tangled her hands in his hair — how he might have made an altar, how he might have worshiped there! — or the crisp green girl who'd called one day like an eminent Cleveland lady to carry on such a sweet and holy conversation with him he felt licked clean and wished gratefully to embrace her; or all those times, his nose in the weeds, he had lain at the fence, watching the croquet, unable to ask if he might play; for fatty Ruth, or the plump girl on the train whom only his shadow had petted; or any of the thousand simple impulses that hurled themselves helplessly against the walls of his heart: to finger the lobe of a strange ear or sniff on hands and knees a patch of something wet, make bawdy verses up and sing them loudly, leap in the air, chew on the thumb of a leather glove, play soccer in the street… any sudden gesture of joy or love… but who could know, when he heard his heart, what the beating was? and who could be expected to understand these gestures, so out of character, so threatening, for weren't they the same moves that went with rage, with lust, with any molesting? well, no matter, it was all a dream, this rapture of touch; you'd taste the knee's rough cover with your tongue; the little girl would squeak and click her eyes; your sweetheart would wet on your hand; yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.
He, Olus Knox, Chamlay and Mat were fishing, not getting much, but fishing; trying the rocky point past the big bend, not getting much, but fishing in the very early morning; the boat passing across the long shale crop opposite the clay 'bank, bringing their bait from the deep to shallow, but with no success but fishing; and he, Olus Knox, Chamlay and Mat had nearly given up hope of fish and had got to that fine point of enjoying, as much as any fish they might have caught, the drops of water clinging to their lines, and the slowly widening rings they made on the surface of the river; when of all things to see floating on the river they saw a large straw hat bobbing on its crown, spinning very slowly, moving very patiently down between the lines toward the boat; and Olus Knox said immediately my god it's Omensetter's hat, but Jethro Furber said immediately oh no it's not, it's not his hat, while the hat drifted to the boat, its brim brushing against the side Chamlay and Mat were fishing from, Jethro Furber and Olus Knox craning to watch it, no one saying a word more or moving to pick it up; and the hat passed under Mat's front line and passed under Chamlay's and rubbed the side of the boat as it passed away around the stern; then Jethro Furber took from Chamlay's tackle box the largest, heaviest sinker he could find and lurching in the boat stood and hurled it into the hat as it went away. Then they drew in their lines and rowed in silence. Jethro Furber scrambled out with the mooring rope and crouched awkwardly on the dock with the rope in his fist thinking of Chamlay's sinker lying in the bottom of the hat and how the brim had curled like a yellow water flower. When the others had gathered their gear and the boat was tied, hearing the child in his voice, yet unable to prevent it, Furber turned to them with an angry face. Wait, he said, trembling all over, wait — just wait.
Thus. Everything so bitterly won, lost. His words had flown like finches. Then the trap of those hands. Why?
It had been raining hard, the wind driving through every protection into his face. He had untented his umbrella, darting for the door. There was the glow of a white shirt… not Mat's… and a rumpled burlap-colored man. But no one was wearing a white shirt, he remembered. Yet a paleness thatched by shadows from the forge floated before him like a cloud, and there was Mat, reassuringly familiar, his figure fringed by the light of the fire. Had he been able to recover the whole of that scene, even as dull as his senses had been while fleeing the downpour, he'd have found the sign on it somewhere, unmistakably stuck like a poster announcing the Ringlings; but it was all so provokingly vague; he'd been taken unfairly unaware; and there remained with him now only a few scattered impressions — the drifting light, the delicate lattices of shadow and the overwhelming sense of Omensetter's size, of his boundless immensity, with the astonishment which followed on it, and then the sudden inexplicable shame and fear — and even these had an unfortunate habit of mixing with those of later meetings… in the open air, in the hot sun, his huge feet shoveling dust, patches of sweat on his shirt like maps of the Great Lakes, the smell of weeds… so that sometimes he wondered whether that ghostly presence wasn't simply a flash from the lake or a limestone jut or a maple revolving its leaves employed by that earlier time to enliven it, as if that peculiar brightness were the sign he was hunting, the clown who burst the bright paper ring or the acrobat in silver tights, an hysterical smile painted on his face, who dangled from the trapeze by his knees.
One Sunday, before the service and against his custom, where the people gathered, he went out to Omensetter, Omuenster's dog, his wife and daughters, and he said, the crowd around him listening on, why don't you come to church, you come to town, why not attend the services instead of throwing stones at the water? and Omensetter smiled and said, why if you like, we will; so presently they did. He'd been a fool, a fool — for he lost his fire. Sin sweetened in his mouth. The climate of the pit grew temperate and the great damnation day drew further off. Consequently Furber was convinced that evil dwelled within the pew where Omensetter sat, and he resolved to speak against it. No longer merely a grim phizzed comedian, he saw his arm outstretched to God, his finger pointing like a thorn upon its branch. He saw his open hand before his face, shielding his eyes from horror, his head thrown back and slightly turned away. He heard his voice echo from his mouth as from a well that drew its water from the center of the earth. Behold, oh Lord, your champion here, your fond believer, for Furber felt his body fill with resolution, and he stood in his study to make the gesture. He jerked his head and he arched his back and he raised his arms, and when his eyes lay naked on his face, he shrieked with joy. Yet when he came before the congregation and took his place and book above it, preparing his words for bearing on the subject, shaping his lips for strong sounds, his certainty grew a hesitation, his strength a meekness, and his sounds came down as softly as the gray birds building in the steeple. He listened to himself as to another man. He preached a God, a law, he never knew. He saw the faces of the people widen with surprise and revelation, and he realized that he was already anticipating the moment when he would stand at the church door awaiting Omensetter's laugh, receiving his felicitations as he stood in line — you sure spoke my mind, Reverend Furber, first rate — while his own hand sank in Omensetter's to its wrist, and his heart turned. I am inhabited, I am possessed, he thought. When the opportunity came he broke off and with great effort drew himself into his study where he swore at the walls and damned Flack for a sooty nigger. But the compliment he dreamed he had received from Omensetter, persistent as a fly, pursued him droning, though now the words were mischievously altered so he heard — you sure spoke my mind, Father Furber, first rate — repeated like a chant of such spiritual profundity its significance could not be caught the first time, and this further increased his already intolerable feeling of futility and despair. Yet by god Omensetter was a stupid fellow; he had too large a mouth; he was wrinkled badly about the eyes; fat padded his face; his hair was always flying. His face was just another — the sixth face, that was all — broadly smiling, widely cracked across. The rain had been rebounding when he'd ducked into the shade of Watson's shop and nearly spitted Omensetter on the point of his umbrella. Was the man wet to the skin? No… but that was the feeling he gave. Actually… what? Tan shirt? open throat? button missing? dry certainly… yes, wet to the skin, beaded, draining, flowering in the water like a splash. A curse on the gray light, on the rain that drove him in, on the foolishness that drove him out in it again to run so unbecomingly, so erratically and without heart, while he wrestled with the catch on his umbrella and stumbled through puddles, his dignity drowning in the tub of his trousers, the rain filling his shoes too and crawling down his back like a party of ants so that when he tried to scratch between his shoulders his hat was shaken loose over his forehead and blown beyond a thin wire fence which he at once charged angrily and angrily shook, and it was there, with the wire responding in his fist, that some sense of the impropriety of his performance reached him, its futility struck him, and its folly… for he could be as easily observed, he supposed, as his hat could, caught on a stalk of last year's cabbage (indeed he imagined the signs brushed up, jumbles of bright red and blue letters that announced his appearance locally, from Friday to Sunday-he was the darkie on the yellow ground — in his famous role as a cheap buffoon, the small black helpless clown the others drenched with water, tickled with unrolling paper tubes and deprived of trousers, so they might implant their grotesque cardboard shoes on his flamboyantly checkered behind, then to goose to the accompaniment of piercing whistles and terrify with firecrackers and packs of little yapping dogs tricked out in tissue paper skins to look like tigers)… its folly was of Egyptian proportions, it nearly brought him to his knees with shame; and he halted himself like an army, folded his umbrella with a great show of composure, and proceeded homeward in a suit of the driest unconcern, head erect, hair knotted, lashes heavy, as if the spring sun were his cover, until, on reaching the churchyard at last, he bolted like a rabbit and threw a tantrum in the vestry, spilling his cuffs and denying the Lord.