Willa Cather

The Troll Garden Willa Cather

It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse-a night when the Spirit was present withpower and when God was very near to man. So it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and FreeGospeller. The schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and sanctified, robust men and women, trembling and quailing before the power of some mysterious psychic force. Here and there amongthis cowering, sweating multitude crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs of anawakened conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete divestment of reason, that frenzyborn of a convulsion of the mind, which, in the parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed "theLight." On the floor before the mourners' bench lay the unconscious figure of a man in whomoutraged nature had sought her last resort. This "trance" state is the highest evidence of graceamong the Free Gospellers, and indicates a close walking with God. Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and vengeance of God, and in his eyesshone a terrible earnestness, an almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who usedto run between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes of life; from the mostdebauched of men he had become the most ascetic. His was a bestial face, a face that bore the stampof Nature's eternal injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over the eyes, and the sandy hair wasplastered down over it and then brushed back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, thenostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely except in his moments of spasmodicearnestness, when it shut like a steel trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep, ruggedfurrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the weakness of the flesh, and about thatdrooping lip were sharp, strenuous lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over thoseseamed cheeks there was a certain pallor, a greyness caught from many a vigil. It was as though, afterNature had done her worst with that face, some fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almosttransfiguring it. Tonight, as his muscles twitched with emotion, and the perspiration dropped fromhis hair and chin, there was a certain convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a manpossessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which all inequalities are leveled, thattransport of conviction which seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees havebecome martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. Thiswas with Asa Skinner tonight, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance of God