Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

He found it. He had to. He thought I got to find it thinking how maybe he would be able to read the name on the mailbox simply because he would have to read it, would have to penetrate through the inscrutable hieroglyph; thinking while he stood looking at the metal hutch with the words Bro J C Goodyhay not stencilled but painted on it, not sloven nor careless but impatiently, with a sort of savage impatience: thinking, either before or at least simultaneous with his realisation that someone nearby was shouting at him Maybe I could read all the time and jest never knowed it until I had to. Anyway, hearing the voice and looking up the tiny savagely untended yard, to another small frame house on that minuscule gallery of which a man stood waving one arm and shouting at him: “This is it. Come on.”—a lean quick-moving man in the middle thirties with coldly seething eyes and the long upper lip of a lawyer or an orator and the long chin of the old-time comic-strip Puritan, who said,

“Hell, you’re aacher.”

“No,” he said. “I been away. I’m trying to get to—”

“All right, all right,” the other said. “I’ll meet you round back,” and went rapidly back into the house. He, Mink, went around it into the back yard, which if anything was of an even more violent desolation than the front, since the back yard contained another house not dismantled so much as collapsed—a jumble of beams, joists, window-and door-frames and even still-intact sections of siding, among which moved or stood rather a man apparently as old as he, Mink, was, although he wore a battle jacket of the type which hadn’t been copied from the British model until after Pearl Harbor, with the shoulder patch of a division which hadn’t existed before then either, who when Mink came in sight began to chop rapidly with the axe in his hand among the jumble of lumber about him; barely in time as the back door of the house crashed open and the first man came out, carrying a buck saw; now Mink saw the sawbuck and a small heap of sawn lengths. “All right, all right,” the first man said, handing Mink the saw. “Save all the sound pieces. Dont split the nails out, pull them out. Saw up all the scraps, same length. Dad is in charge. I’ll be in the house,” and went back into it; even doors which he barely released seemed to clap to behind him violently, as though his passage had sucked them shut.

“So they caught you too did they, mac?” the man in the battle jacket (he would be Dad) said.

Mink didn’t answer that. He said: “Is that the reverend?”

“That’s Goodyhay,” the other said. “I aint heard him preach yet but even if he hadn’t opened his mouth he would be a better preacher than he is a cook. But then, somebody’s got to scorch the biscuits. They claim his wife ran off with a sonabitching Four-F potato-chip salesman before he even got back from fighting in the Pacific. They were all doing it back then and what I notice, they aint quit, even without any war to blame it on. But what the hell, I always say there’s still a frog in the puddle for every one that jumps out. So they caught you too, huh?”

This time he answered. “I got to get to Memphis and then back down to Missippi. I’m already behind. I got to get on tonight. How much does he pay here?”

“That’s what you think,” the other said. “That’s what I thought three days ago: pick up a dollar or so and move on. Because you’re building a church this time, bully boy. So maybe we both better hope the bastard can preach since we aint going to get our money until they take up the collection Sunday.”

“Sunday?” he said.

“That’s right,” the other said. “This is Thursday; count it.”

“Sunday,” he said. “That’s three days.”

“That’s right,” the other said. “Sunday’s always three days after Thursday around here. It’s a law they got.”

“How much wher get on Sunday?”

“It may be as much as a dollar cash; you’re working for the Lord now, not mammon, jack. But anyway you’ll be fed and slept—”

“I cant work that long for jest a dollar,” he said. “I aint got the time.”