by Joan Brady
She opened her eyes at once. ‘Of course I’m awake,’ she said. She turned toward him and reached out to stroke his neck. ‘I never go to sleep before you, Johnny. I can’t somehow.’
They stayed on in Eliza’s tiny upstairs room. There wasn’t enough money to build a house, and anyway Jonathan was afraid for Sarah to be alone while she was pregnant. Eliza, somewhat to her own annoyance, didn’t worsen and die as she had so often predicted. In fact, with Carma’s future settled, she began to gain a little weight and something of the energy Jonathan remembered from years before.
‘Call me “mother”,’ she said to him one day.
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t know a good idea if it stood up and slapped your face, Preacher. You do as I say.’
‘Whatever happened to your baby? The little boy – what was his name? Netty? What happened to him?’
‘Went west.’
‘You can’t go west from here,’ he said irritably. ‘This is west.’
‘That’s what I told him. “I’m going west,” he said. Ain’t seen him since. You call me “mother”.’
Jonathan planned to be in Hannaville for the birth itself; he’d arranged for Dr Mundt, who lived in Walla Walla and charged five dollars a visit, to attend. Eliza disapproved. ‘Birthing ain’t got nothing to do with men,’ she said. But Jonathan’s word was law. Besides, he liked Burgess Mundt, a thin, stooped young man, and the only educated company for miles around. Burgess had taken a degree in philosophy before going into medical school, and he’d taken it at a time when philosophy departments still concerned themselves with the big questions, with God, free will, the meanings of things.
‘What we need is a science of truth,’ Burgess said one afternoon over a Sunday dinner that Eliza had prepared. Eliza added strange things to her roasts – herbs and preserves that she’d potted herself. ‘We need some way of dividing things up so we can make sense of them – cast off some of the veils that cloud the issue – analyze them somehow. Everybody disagrees with everybody else. Why isn’t there some sort of consensus? There is in medicine. Why not philosophy?’ Burgess had a long upper lip and a small round nose; he’d come west for the sea air, but he coughed even so and there were days when he confined himself to bed with poultices on his chest.
‘You agree with all other doctors, do you?’ Jonathan said, his sarcasm as thick as Eliza’s plum jam.
‘Of course I don’t. Some of them are nuts. Vaccination, for example: what an absurd idea!’
‘You can’t analyze God, can you? Or truth?’
‘Well, I don’t—’
‘Then all you’ve got left is words,’ Jonathan said.
Burgess sat quiet for awhile. ‘Just because I don’t know how, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying. It just doesn’t add up, Johnny.’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Life.’
‘Why should it?’
Burgess would have been fascinated with the pickings through higher grammar that Columbia forced down my throat in the name of philosophy; he was plainly ahead of his time. So was Jonathan, who got to the essence of Columbia’s agenda without even trying. Certainly from what he reports of this conversation, I think he would have reacted to linguistic philosophy much as I did. I was stunningly bad at it. I don’t mean that I got bad grades. I didn’t. I made the dean’s list every term. ‘I see your name on the dean’s list,’ said one of my professors, a young one, one interested in the philosophy of science, where there are real excitements, rather than in the science of philosophy, which strangles all questions it can’t answer as ruthlessly as farmwives strangle stray kittens. He was a very funny man, this young professor, much loved by his students for his parodies of what Columbia’s philosophers spent their time on; in the end, the department fired him. ‘No,’ he said, correcting himself, ‘I can’t quite say that. I didn’t actually see your name on the list: I saw the letters that make up your name . . .’
‘There must be something solid in all the transience,’ said Burgess, ‘something to hang onto.’
‘How can you drivel on like this?’ Jonathan said. ‘The pieces don’t add up because adding up isn’t part of the plan.’
‘There is something we can get at, something we can tie down—’
‘Why?’
‘Because I can feel it. You can feel it.’
‘I feel nothing.’
Within the past year Senator George Stoke of Kansas, known now to an entire nation as the ‘fighting liberal’, had launched a campaign against what he called ‘America’s lack of community’. Support for him grew every day. He attacked everything from pot-holes in the road and nonexistent street lighting to graft and corruption in the Senate itself, and he used all the graft and corruption available to him (which was considerable) to push through the legislation he wanted pushed through. The reports made Jonathan’s hands shake: he knew that what George stood for was right. These were policies he believed in himself, policies he spoke for in his sermons, policies he would have fought for on a wider stage if he’d had the power to fight for them there – if he’d been in George’s place. How can such a thing be? It caused a rebellion inside him, a state of civil war within his own soul, which in turn caused a serious loss of morale in the already weakened troops massed against George. As everybody knows, civil wars are the bloodiest, the most vicious; victory is never enough: such wars don’t stop until everything lies in ruins.
‘Come on, Johnny, what have you got to lose?’ Burgess was saying. ‘What’s wrong with peeling off a few layers? – looking for something to analyze? Maybe we’ll run across some avenue into the meaning of things. Why not?’
‘The universe affronts me,’ Jonathan said. ‘I do not accept it – or its meanings.’
Sarah’s pains began in the middle of her eighth month. Burgess was no more than two hundred yards away, attending the farrier, whose broken leg refused to mend. Sarah was peeling potatoes. She screamed when the first contraction hit her and dropped the bowl. Jonathan came running to find her crouched among shards and vegetables, eyes white all around the flecked-hazel iris, mouth agape with terror; Eliza was on her knees, stroking Sarah’s back and crooning softly. ‘Get her upstairs,’ she said to him.
He carried Sarah up the first few steps, murmuring reassurances he didn’t feel just as, long ago, he’d murmured assurances he didn’t feel to College when College lay dying. The second contraction caught her as they reached the tiny landing; she screamed again and clutched at him so fiercely that they almost fell down the stairs together. She screamed a third time as he settled her down on the quilt.
‘You’re going to need Cheeba, Johnny,’ Eliza said. ‘I’m telling you true, this ain’t no job for a man.’
But he was already running to fetch Burgess, who tiptoed along the muddy street in patent leather shoes, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and disappeared upstairs.
Jonathan had watched animals being born – many times. He and Alvah Stoke had both been up to their elbows in a cow, both of them covered in blood, each grappling a leg of a breech-presenting calf, and all the while the cow chewed her cud as though bored by the whole procedure – not like this. The screaming went on intermittently all afternoon and all night, punctuated by Burgess’s cough. Eliza fetched water from the pump and boiled it on the pot-bellied stove; she fetched towel after towel, running to borrow from one neighbor after another. Jonathan watched her carry these things up the stairs; he watched her bring bowls full of knotted linen down again, bright with blood. But she barred his way to the room. ‘I already got one man in that room mucking things up,’ she said. ‘I ain’t having another.’
And the truth of the matter was, he didn’t really want to see. Instead, he raged back and forth across the small downstairs room, hands slimy with sweat, mouth dry. He raged against the straightback chairs in his path, against the knick-knacks on the shelf above the stove, against the windows that rattled at his angr
y steps, against sex, against Sarah for putting him through this, against the God in Whom he no longer believed.
Before morning Burgess appeared. He eased himself into a chair opposite Jonathan. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny,’ he said, ‘I’m really – I’ll try to save the baby’ – he shook his head – ‘but I don’t think—’
‘To hell with the baby,’ Jonathan said. ‘I want my wife.’
‘All we’ve got left is prayer.’
Jonathan turned away and stared out at the frozen landscape. ‘What kind of sanctimonious crap is that?’ he said. ‘Where’s the man of science you keep telling me about? You save my wife, damnit – What do you want, mother?’ He swung around to face Eliza as she came through the door. ‘Or have you just come to watch the effect of the news on the sorrowing husband?’
Eliza looked him up and down. ‘You’re a fool, boy,’ she said. ‘I told you before and I’m telling this here man doctor, too. You got to get Cheeba.’
Burgess shook his head. ‘Let her die in Christian hands, Missis Chawder. There’s nothing anybody can do.’
Eliza didn’t even look at him. ‘Take potatoes. She’ll follow you for potatoes. Go, Johnny. Now.’
Jonathan’s circuit took him to the Indian reservation five miles to the south. He’d preached in the potlatch house there only once. Almost as soon as he began the sermon he realized that his audience, hidden away on their platforms behind their family totems, watched him with sullen eyes and watched him only because he’d brought food. Thereafter, he visited as his circuit required, but he didn’t preach; he brought food, sharpened tools, helped mend anything that seemed to need mending. He was good with his hands. The Indians hadn’t grown friendly.
He grabbed a twenty-pound sack of potatoes from the kitchen store and went.
On the return trip, the Indian woman Cheeba clung to his back. Her smell of grease and rancid sweat nauseated him even in the open air, and the dark, worn hands – broken fingernails hooked over his vest – filled him with dread. By the time he arrived with her – less than an hour – Sarah’s screams had stopped. He ran up the stairs behind Cheeba, who dropped to her knees beside the bed as he entered the room and laid her greased, black-haired head on Sarah’s breast. Sarah’s face was gray. Eliza stood in front of the window, blocking out the light, holding what looked to Jonathan like a bundle of laundry in her arms.
‘How long she been like this? Still bleeding?’ Cheeba said, not looking up.
‘No bleeding now, but bad from the start of things,’ Eliza told her as she rocked the bundle, which squeaked out a cry. Jonathan looked at it with a wrenching love so tangled that the love itself seemed to him a deadly instrument, something to be feared just as the coupling that had resulted in this hell was to be feared hereafter – and what an evil thing it was, all that gasping, slippery ecstasy, that had made of Sarah’s body an instrument of torture and self-destruction. But he hadn’t known. He hadn’t understood. For ignorance, there is forgiveness. The baby, though: the baby was different. He’d denied the baby to Burgess as surely as Peter had denied Jesus to the maid of the high priest. For this there could be no forgiveness.
‘Will it live?’ he whispered to Eliza.
She nodded.
Sarah swung her head restlessly from side to side on the pillow. ‘Now look away, Preacher,’ Cheeba said. She took one of Sarah’s breasts in both hands and twisted it with all the strength in her muscular arms and fingers. Sarah lifted out of the bed and screamed, her eyes opening wide. Jonathan reeled back and found himself in Burgess’s arms. Cheeba twisted again. The scream was louder this time, fuller.
‘Jesus!’ Burgess whispered.
The Indian woman sat back on her haunches and watched. Sarah panted and gasped. Deep red weals emerged on the skin of her bare breasts.
‘Want water?’ Cheeba said. ‘You get water.’ She turned to Jonathan. ‘Lots of water – with little salt in it and little bit sugar.’
Jonathan ran downstairs, filled the pitcher and ran back up. Sarah’s face already showed the beginnings of color. The Indian woman took water in the palm of her hand and pressed it into Sarah’s mouth. The color grew. Sarah lay silent but she was breathing firmly; Jonathan kept his eyes on the barbaric figure of her savior, on the multi-colored dress, the ragged braids, the rough hands and broken nails, the beads of bear teeth and the glittering stones. Her rancid smell filled the room, and the color was full in Sarah’s face.
‘Thank God,’ Jonathan sighed to himself, hardly aware of the words he spoke and wholly oblivious of their absurdity.
6
‘You understand, this wasn’t magic or anything,’ Atlas said. He poured some of the whiskey he’d bought at the supermarket earlier into the cold dregs of tea that remained in front of us, just as he’d poured gin and brandy into his morning’s coffee. When he breathed in my direction the air was a miasma of sour alcohol, and he forgot from time to time that the small microphone on the table in front of him was, in fact, a microphone; its texture seemed to please him, and he rubbed his fingers along it. I took it away from him once or twice, but after a few minutes he was back fondling it again; when I listened to the tapes later, back in England, much of what he said came through only roughly beyond the static he’d created. ‘When the Indian woman twisted mother’s breast, it was as though she’d injected adrenaline. That’s what pain does: jolt of adrenaline. Very modern practice for people in shock. They didn’t have artificial adrenaline then, and even if they had had it – But how an Indian woman knew about it, I just couldn’t tell you – or how she knew to put salt and sugar in the water. Dad swore it was true.’
‘Do you believe him?’ I asked.
‘Why not? Whatever else he was or wasn’t, he was a painfully honest guy. There aren’t many places I’d doubt him. Can’t see any reason to doubt him in a thing like this.’
Whatever you have threatens you because you can lose it. Sarah was so much younger than Jonathan that he had never considered the possibility of her dying before him – and so it was that she opened up yet another flank in the battered army of his spirit. Defeat was so close he could smell it; the time for serious realignment had come, and he went at the job with a fearsome array of determination. Along with the diaries, I keep on my desk the Bible my grandfather kept on his. Open to Ecclesiastes, and you find he’s underlined the words, ‘And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets.’ This was the moat that was to surround his new battlements. He forced himself to notice that Sarah was a poor cook and that the freckles on her arms were not as charming as the freckles on her nose. He swore celibacy. He’d been celibate once; he could do it again. But he did not find it easy.
From her side, Sarah fretted over his coldness, felt it was punishment for her limitations, some of which he knew, some of which he had yet to learn. Since he was no better at expressing his love for the baby than he was at expressing his love for her, she thought he probably resented the baby, too, and resented her for having borne him. But she had no idea how to mend things, and so began to mark out a few resentments of her own.
Next to money, though, sex is nothing, and the harder Jonathan worked at the profession he despised – and despised as much for the pleasure it gave him as for the imposture it forced on him – the less money there seemed to be. People paid him with chickens and vegetables for his sermons, and even with these they seemed to be more and more niggardly. When an ignorant stuffed shirt who represented the Washington District Synod came to visit, Jonathan corrected his grammar. Afterwards Sarah said, ‘That wasn’t wise, Johnny. You mustn’t let them know how smart you are. They won’t like it.’ She was right. And this, too, he held against her.
‘Dear Johnny’ – the letter was postmarked Ellsworth, Maine – ‘I am sorry to say I have a statement on my desk from the Washington District Synod concerning you.’ Jonathan bought a ticket to Ellsworth.
Grayberg’s cluttered study smelled of burned porridge as it always had; dust still hung on
the walls, and the chair Jonathan sat in was covered with the well-remembered dog’s hairs. Grayberg was unchanged, too, still the same short, irascible, pot-bellied, un-parsonlike parson, who loved his food much and messily; on this morning, a piece of dried egg yolk clung to his upper lip and jiggled as he spoke.
‘Reports in here were middling good,’ Grayberg said, holding up a sheaf of papers that Jonathan knew to be his personal file, ‘up till about eight – maybe ten months ago.’ Grayberg took his breath in sharply; the piece of egg yolk stood at attention. ‘Examination results good. Written sermons good. Delivery good. Personal conduct good.’ Jonathan shifted in his chair. ‘But now – but now, my young friend—’
Grayberg selected three or four papers to waggle at Jonathan, who reached out for them.
‘No, sir.’ Grayberg drew them back. ‘Nope. You ain’t allowed to lay eyes on these.’
‘Why the hell not?’ Jonathan said irritably.
‘Well, what do you know? Charge number one proven just like that.’ Grayberg shook his head and the piece of egg yolk shook with it. ‘Blasphemy, Reverend. I thought that was going to be the tough one. Difficult stuff, hearsay, ain’t it? Not that a few barnyard words do you any harm, but cussing as such—’
‘What are the other charges?’ Jonathan interrupted. ‘Must be more than an ill-chosen word here and there.’
‘You fixing to listen to me, or—’
‘Is charges the right word, by the way? Am I standing in the witness box?’
Grayberg shut his mouth with a snap. The piece of egg yolk dropped to the desk in front of him. ‘Oh me, oh my, ain’t we touchy?’ He poked at the fallen scrap for a minute. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The Ministerial Session out there wrote to me. He’s your boy, they said, ask him a few questions. What I hear is that these days you ain’t exhorting sinners at all. Says right here you’re on about, uh’ – he checked the page in front of him – ‘universal divinity. What is that stuff anyways?’