It was her father who came out, who had certainly crept downstairs to spy on them, and he was in such a fury that she thought for a minute he had gone crazy. He jerked David to his feet before the boy had time to defend himself. Slapping him three times in the face with all his strength, her father gave him such a violent shove that the boy lost his balance on the steps and fell sprawling on the walk below. All this, Wayne Buchanan did to the boy Donna had almost loved in a graceful fragment of time.
On the sidewalk, David got to his feet and began to sob, not so much in fear or pain as in anger of his own.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” he said. “You mean son-of-a-bitch.”
Wayne Buchanan started down the steps, and the boy turned and ran, and Buchanan also turned and came back up onto the porch.
“Go upstairs to your room,” he said.
She looked at him levelly, and she was not really angry nor in the least afraid. If he had been a stranger, she might have felt fear or anger or possibly both, but he was not a stranger, he was her father, and she was only sickened and shamed and ineffably lost.
“You heard what he called you,” she said. “He called you a mean son-of-a-bitch, and that’s what you are. You’re a mean, dirty son-of-a-bitch of a hypocrite, and I wish you were dead. I hope David comes back with a gun and shoots you dead.”
He raised a heavy hand and struck her in the face. Her light body was slammed back by the blow against the siding of the house, and she slipped down slowly into a sitting position with the long, full skirt of her new gown billowing around her like a bright cloud. A thin, bitter fluid came up from her stomach into her mouth, and she thought for a terrible moment that she was going to vomit, which would have been, somehow, the most shameful thing of all, and then she stood up and faced him again.
“Don’t ever hit me again,” she said. “Don’t hit me or touch me so long as you live.”
Turning away from him, she opened the screen door and went into the house quietly, and in the end, in a monstrous perversion of normal effect, it was he who was afraid.
2.
It was not the first time he had been afraid. As a boy, he was afraid of his father, who was a minister of the gospel, and later on, when he was himself studying for the ministry at a small denominational college, he was afraid in a different kind of way of a young man named Cletus Corey, who was his roommate.
Cletus Corey was known as a rather dangerous liberal among the three or four hundred students in the college. It was his theory that a minister of the gospel, in order to be really effective, should have a rich, empirical knowledge of the world and its works, even at the expense of minor virtues, and he was fond of pointing out that even Saint Francis of Assisi had been quite a rounder in his younger years. This theory of deliberate deviation for the sake of worldly effectiveness was disturbing enough in itself, but it was made doubly so by illustrative use of the saint, who had been a Catholic (Roman), of course, and was therefore not an acceptable example for young Christians living in the age of enlightenment. But Cletus was certainly catholic (meaning liberal) and he looked to all sorts and extremes of examples in the application of his theory to himself. He was able to admire both William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. He subscribed to the American Mercury, read H. L. Mencken with roars of delight, and passed Elmer Gantry around to his more liberal cronies. It was generally predicted that he would either be an enormous success or become an enormous cropper, but as it turned out, neither of these predictions was fulfilled. In time, at the request of the college authorities, he abandoned his theological studies, and shortly afterward, at the request of an impatient parent, he got a job and made quite a bit of money selling secondhand automobiles.
He left college at the same time that Wayne Buchanan left, and for the same reason. The truth is, the reason for their leaving was quite a scandal at the time, and it was all the unfortunate result of Cletus Corey’s applied theory. The ingredients of the scandal were juicy and really deserved the attention of more accomplished practicioners than Buchanan and Corey. They included a roadhouse, a stripper, drunkenness, and fornication. The roadhouse was a notorious highway spot known as the Blue Barn, because it looked like a barn and was painted blue, and it was strictly off-limits to students of the college, but Corey had been there before without subsequent retribution, temporal or divine, and he kept suggesting to Buchanan that it would be broadening and beneficial if he were to go also.
“It’s a kind of moral obligation to have some experience in these things,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s a pretty poor sort of minister who can’t trust himself to find out what life’s like just because he’s afraid it will corrupt him.”
This argument appealed to Buchanan. He saw himself standing strong and clean and unassailable, a source of salvation among the fleshpots.
“After all,” Buchanan said, “what if the prophets had ignored Sodom and Gomorrah and Babylon and such places as that? It’s perfectly apparent that the prophets knew all about them, and that’s why they were able to combat their evil and even save some of the sinners who would otherwise have been lost in them.”
“Now you’re getting it,” Corey said.
“What’s this Blue Barn like?” Buchanan said.
“Well, it’s just a big room with a bar and a lot of chairs and tables and a place to dance. There’s a small band Saturday nights, and they have a floor show at eleven and another around one. They must pay off to the cops or something, because there’s quite a lot of drinking and sometimes it gets pretty rough.”
“What kind of floor show do they have?”
“There’s this fellow introduces the acts, an M.C. he’s called, and he sings some songs that are really pretty dirty and disgusting, and there are a couple of girls who dance.”
“What kind of dance?”
“They just sort of move around to the music and make motions of various kinds and take off their clothes.”
“No fooling? How do they get away with that sort of thing?”
“Oh, well, there’s no law against it, so far as that goes.”
“No temporal law, maybe.”
“Sure, sure. I’m not saying it’s right, you understand. One of these girls is called Trixie, and she’s about as pretty as any girl you could see anywhere. It makes you feel real bad to see her dancing around practically naked in front of all those men and all. If the right fellow came along who could make her see how she shouldn’t do things like that, he could probably save her.”
“Well, that would certainly be commendable,” Buchanan said. “We mustn’t forget the parable of the black sheep.”
“Nor Mary Magdalen either.”
“That’s true. That’s certainly true.”
This line of thought was also appealing to Buchanan. He considered himself a right fellow in any possible contingency, and now, considering the practically naked Trixie, he actually wondered if he might not be receiving some kind of call. He could see himself saving her from the shame of ogles, and in his imagination receiving her gratitude and love — platonic, of course, unless he went so far as marrying her for her own good, in which eventuality there were additional purifying possibilities as well as a satisfying element of sacrifice.