The Moth

By Geoffrey Gaskill.

It wasn’t always like this. Before her, he believed he could have looked his God in the face on Judgement Day and not felt the weight of his sins.

He’d fallen when he took a woman they called Mulatto Betsy first from the fields into his kitchen and later into his bed.

She made him hard.

She made him weak.

She made him everything in between.

She was his fatal flaw. He fooled no-one when he came home and called her his wife. Servants and slaves alike, not to mention neighbours and friends laughed behind their hands. He could call her his wife, but she’d always be his whore.

He long ceased to care what they thought. When she touched him, he felt his guts churned both in excitement and terror of the Pit. He burned for her, and she didn’t disappoint. He filled her with his soul and his seed, but neither were enough for him. In his exhaustion and his gluttony, even as he felt her sweat on him and the saltiness of her mouth, he needed more.

Earlier they had laboured, mouth to mouth, hips moving with increasing earnestness while outside thunder roared and lightning flashed, till they fell spent on the sweat-soaked sheets. Now, outside the window the night was cooling but in their bedroom the air was still heavy with damp and lust.

He might feel sleep creeping over him, but he still wanted to reach out and touch her. Instead, he her fingers walked across his stomach and hips with a feather light touch, tempting him to one more time.

He brushed her hand away. The sermon that he had abandoned some time before needed completing. In a few hours he would stand before the congregation with her wetness on him and feel its eyes upon him. Hypocrite those eyes would say. And they were right. ‘God loves the sinner but not the sin,’ he once thundered from the pulpit. ‘He forgives temptation but not the yielding to temptation.’ That was before he knew Betsy. Now whatever he said was all blather. He knew what he was just as God and the congregation did.

He threw on his nightshirt after swinging his legs off the bed. He got up and groped his way into the parlour. He looked back as he closed the door and could just make out her shape. The memory of their sin inflamed him. One more time.

He struck flint to light the candle.

The nightshirt was tight and clung to his skin. He sat down and took out ink and paper. He looked at the words he’d written earlier and felt the quill stiff but unresponsive in his fingers. Images of Hell swam before his eyes. Everyone feared something. For him, it was what Betsy portended, not what the congregation thought. When it was no more than a memory, the stink and the smoke of the fires to come would become real enough. The meek might inherit the earth but for the unrepentant sinner he was, perdition awaited.

He pushed open the window and looked out. He could hear the last droplets of rain from the roof falling to the courtyard below. In the candlelight he could see his flower box with the last of the summer’s blooms drooping and fading. Along one of the bent stalks a leaf held on. A rill of moisture fed a quivering and dangling drop of water at its tip. It hovered there, all the time growing larger as if clinging to life. Suddenly it released its grip and launched itself into the darkness of the undergrowth below.

Relieved of its burden, the stalk sprang erect, only to have more water run down its veins, pool and form another bead. In turn that swelled. Again, leaf and stalk together began to nod. The droplet swelled and quivered before falling into the unknown. Stalk, leaf, liquid. Repeating.

Sitting at his desk, he could hear Betsy, her breathing heavy and regular. Asleep she may have been, but she still stirred him. The door might be closed, and he could blow out the candle but, in the darkness or in the light, she was with him always. He could not unsee those times when she danced for him naked before the fire, or laughed and rolled on the bed, holding out her arms. He could never unsee the sweat glistening on her dark skin like the droplets of water on leaf and flower.

There were nights when she called out for him, nights when she said she was lonely, and she couldn’t understand why he was so cold to her. On those nights he resolved to purify his perturbed spirit. Whether she cried or whispered sweet and sultry nothings in his ear, his conscience told him to abjure them – and her – as the bestial and impure things they were. But he always went back to her because he was weak. The beasts of the fields had more willpower than he did. When she lay in the moonlight of warm nights, he wanted to play her like he played his piano. She was the black keys, he the white.

Unseeing was impossible. Unwanted. How could he live without the sight of her beautiful breasts? Had he been able to unsee it wouldn’t have made any difference. The deeds were done. Despite such moments of self-loathing his nostrils flared in anticipation of her scent. He could hear her laughter. It was the laughter of life.

To get his mind off such thoughts, he shut his eyes to will himself to concentrate on the sermon but as a matter of course his thoughts slid like mud down a hill.

Why did he worry about the Pit? Betsy and he were lost causes from the start.

He put down his quill and groped for his Bible. Holding it in the light of the candle there was some comfort. As there was in the cool touch of the book. In the distance he could hear the slaves moving out into the fields, their singing drifted in through his open window.

‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, but the fire next time.
Hide me over, Rock of Ages, cleft for me.’

He paused. Purification. By water or fire. Water was mentioned a total of seven hundred and twenty-two times in the Bible and fire five hundred and forty-nine, more often than faith, hope, prayer, and worship. Each time water and fire had spoken to him in the voice of God. But after Betsy, it was the fire next time.

He turned the pages of his Bible, his finger feeling the words one at a time. For a time, they would soothe the chaos of his tormented soul at the same time as they underlined his hypocrisy. Here were the words of God and his God was jealous, angry and avenging.

In the darkness he could hear the insistent buzz of insects and the fluttering of moths. One by one they gravitated to the candle there to be consumed in a brief flash of light. He put his hand over the flame and felt it burn his skin. Like the moths he, too, was drawn it. He might claim to worship God with all his heart and soul, but she was his light, alluring, and drawing him in. It was blasphemous to think of God competing with her willing hands and lips and body. He longed to be like St Augustine. Chaste. Not now, but later.

His hand dropped over the flame, plunging the room into darkness. He felt the pain and smelled the scorched skin and bit his lip to stop himself from crying out. Get used to that, he thought. Out through the window he could see the light of the dawn finger-painting itself onto the horizon. One more day. Another temptation.

Out past the dripping leaves of the flower box he could see the slaves moving out into the fields, beyond earshot, their song fading into the morning. Outside his window, he saw the garden being born.

From inside the bedroom, he heard a noise. Betsy, like the other household slaves, out of habit was stirring at their usual hour. Instead of a song, her voice was drunk with sleep, warmth and fatigue. That did not stop her calling to him. For him.

Like a willing moth in the dark, he stood and moved towards his light. He opened the bedroom door and entered. The unfinished sermon lay on the table. It had waited this long, it could wait a while longer.

As he was about to enter the bedroom, he stopped and looked into the darkness there. He heard sheets thrown back.

She made him hard.

The last thing he heard before he closed the door was the crowing of the cock.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geoff spent thirty something years of his working life telling children how to write.

At retirement he decided to practise what he preached. Much of this output sits in his top drawer at varying stages of ‘completion’.

Otherwise he is an actor and director in the local theatre scene. After all, actors and directors are storytellers too.