A Lesson Before Dying (21 page)

Paul stopped talking. He was breathing heavily. He was looking at me but seeing Jefferson in that chair. We started walking again. We were passing by Miss Emma's house, but Paul didn't know this. He had never been in the quarter before.

“After they put the death cloth over his face, I couldn't watch anymore. I looked down at the floor,” Paul was saying. His voice was quieter, less intense now. “I heard the two jolts, but I wouldn't look up. I'll never forget the sound of that generator as long as I live on this earth.”

We came to the end of the quarter and stood on the railroad tracks while gazing across the field at the rows of early cane. Paul got in front of me to look in my face.

“You're one great teacher, Grant Wiggins,” he said.

“I'm not great. I'm not even a teacher.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You have to believe to be a teacher,” I said, looking at the rows of new cane. To the right of where we were standing were the tall pecan trees in the cemetery. There would be another grave there within a day or two.

“I saw the transformation, Grant Wiggins,” Paul said.

“I didn't do it.”

“Who, then?”

“Maybe he did it himself.”

“He never could have done that. I saw the transformation. I'm a witness to that.”

“Then maybe it was God,” I said.

Paul continued to look at me. He did not like the way I had used the name of God. He came from good stock. He believed. But he didn't say anything.

“You're ready to start back?” I asked him.

“I didn't open his notebook,” Paul said. We had turned and were walking up the quarter now. “I didn't think it was my place to open the notebook. He asked me to bring it to you, and I brought it to you. But I would like to know his thoughts sometime—if you don't mind.”

“After I read it,” I said.

“I suppose this has been very hard on everybody.”

“Hard on the people here,” I said.

“School is just about ready to end, huh?” Paul asked, after a while.

“Yes,” I said. “We start a month later and get out two months earlier than the whites do.”

“What are you going to do when school is over? Go on a vacation?”

“I don't know. It depends on Vivian. Whatever she wants.”

“She's beautiful,” Paul said. “You're a lucky fellow there, Grant Wiggins.”

“Yes, I'm lucky,” I said. “Some of us are.”

“I'm sorry,” Paul said. “I am very, very sorry.”

We had stopped for a moment. Now we started walking again.

“If I could ever be of any help, I would like you to call on me. I mean that with all my heart.”

We were passing by Miss Emma's house. Reverend Ambrose's car was parked before the door.

“Isn't that the preacher's car?” Paul asked.

“That's where Jefferson lived. That's his nannan's house.”

Paul looked at the house as we went by. He looked at it again over his shoulder. We came up to the church and stopped at his car.

“Well, I better go in to the children,” I said.

Paul stuck out his hand.

“Allow me to be your friend, Grant Wiggins. I don't ever want to forget this day. I don't ever want to forget him.”

I took his hand. He held mine with both of his.

“I don't know what you're going to say when you go back in there. But tell them he was the bravest man in that room today. I'm a witness, Grant Wiggins. Tell them so.”

“Maybe one day you will come back and tell them so.”

“It would be an honor.”

I turned from him and went into the church. Irene Cole told the class to rise, with their shoulders back. I went up to the desk and turned to face them. I was crying.

Also by
ERNEST J. GAINES

A Gathering of Old Men

In My Father's House

A Long Day in November

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Bloodline

Of Love and Dust

Catherine Carmier

Acclaim for
ERNEST J. GAINES's

A
LESSON
BEFORE
DYING

“A strongly felt and—in the best sense—ambitious novel.”

—
Newsday

“A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“The lesson is valuable and apt, presented in the modest but forceful terms that we have come to expect from Ernest J. Gaines.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“Gaines has a gift for evoking the tenor of life in a bygone era and making it seem as vivid and immediate as something that happened only yesterday.”

—
Christian Science Monitor

ERNEST J. GAINES

A
LESSON
BEFORE
DYING

Ernest J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. His previous books include
A Gathering of Old Men, In My Father's House, A Long Day in November, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Bloodline, Of Love and Dust
, and
Catherine Carmier
. He divides his time between San Francisco and the University of Southwestern Louisiana, in Lafayette, where he is writer-in-residence.

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JUNE 1994

Copyright © 1993 by Ernest J. Gaines

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1993.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gaines, Ernest J., 1933—

A lesson before dying / Ernest J. Gaines.—

1st Vintage contemporaries ed.

p.cm.—(Vintage contemporaries)

1. Afro-American men—Louisiana—Fiction. 2. Death row inmates—Louisiana—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Louisiana—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3557.A355L47 1994

813'.54—dc20  93-42201

CIP        

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