Dagon

by Fred Chappell

  By the black range stood a woman who looked older than Morgan, her hair yellowish white, raddled here and there with gray streaks. She was huge, fatter even than Morgan, her breadth was at least half the length of the stove. She bulged impossibly in her old printed cotton dress and he shuddered inwardly at the thought of her finally bulging out of it, standing before him naked. In proportion to her great torso her arms and legs were very short and in tending her cooking she made slow short motions; she used her limbs no more than she had to, as if these were more or less irrelevant appendages. What was obviously important was the great fat­ness of her breasts, her belly, her thighs. She gave Peter a slow but only cursory look, turned her unmoved, unmoving gaze to Morgan. When Morgan introduced Peter she didn’t acknowl­edge him by so much as a nod.

  “This here’s my wife Ina,” Morgan said. “And this here’s my daughter Mina. She’s the only one of our young’uns that’s left with us now. The rest has all gone off different places, they couldn’t find nothing to stay around here for, I guess. But Mina’s stayed on with the old folks.”

  She sat at the weak-looking table. He couldn’t guess her age, maybe fourteen or fifteen or six­teen. She sat playing with a couple of sticky strands of hair as black as onyx. She leaned back in a little creaky wooden chair and gave him a bald stark gaze. He felt enveloped in the stare, which was not a stare but simply an act of the eyes remaining still, those eyes which seemed as large as eggs, so gray they were almost white, reflecting, almost absolutely still. His skin had prickled at first, he had thought she had no nose, it was so small and flat, stretched on her face as smooth as wax. Leaned back in the chair that way, her body, flat and square, seemed as com­placent as stone, all filled with calm waiting; this was her whole attitude. She played listlessly with her hair, looking at him. It was impossible. That body so stubby and that face so flatly ugly—something undeniably fishlike about it—and still, still it exercised upon him immediately an attraction, the fascination he might have in watching a snake uncoil itself lazily and curl along the ground. He couldn’t believe it; maybe it was the crazy musky odor of the house, confus­ing all his impressions, his senses. He had to use his whole will to take his eyes off her.

  “This here’s Pete Leland,” Morgan said. “He’s the one that owns the place now, the whole farm. He’s Miz Annie’s grandson, and he’s a preacher. He’s the only Leland I ever heard of that was a preacher.”

  Mina gave a soft slow nod, still looking at him, and it was directly to him that she spoke. “You’re awful good-looking,” she said. “You’re so good-looking I could just eat you up. I bet I could just eat you up.” Her voice was soft and thick as cotton.

  Morgan sniggered. “Don’t pay her no mind,” he said. “If you pay her any mind she’ll drive you crazy, I swear she will.”

  But it had started and the whole while he walked back to the big brick house—going not the way he came, but following the winding red dirt road along the hillside—her flat dark face hung like a warning lantern in his mind. He couldn’t unthink her image.

  THREE

  Peter Leland would have admitted himself that his choice of the ministry as profession had risen hazy from his soiled smoky imagination. He would have admitted that he saw the Christian religion as a singularly uncheerful endeavor, and this he would have admitted as a fault in himself, one he felt powerless to remedy. It was simply that his black imagination forced him to take everything all too seriously, and exercised a partially debilitating influence on his work. He had, for instance, no very consoling bedside manner, and his hospital visits with members of his congregation turned out invariably to be ex­tremely awkward affairs. And a few of his ser­mons might vie with some of Jonathan Edwards’ for gloominess, though Peter lacked that zealous fire. One symptom of his racked fancy showed itself in his fantasies about his father, who had died when Peter was so young that he could not at all remember him. His father had died when the family lived here on the farm, and Peter’s mother had taken him away then to live with her and her parents in the eastern part of the state. Her family was pretty well off financially—her father owned an important electrical-appliance distributorship—and they were able to send Peter to the single large privately en­dowed university in the state. During his fresh­man year there his mother had died. Peter was shocked, grieved deeply, but he was not sur­prised. His mother had been long waning; she had always been a pale silent little woman, and this white quietude he had only half-consciously attributed to her grieving for his dead father. This was the one subject, at any rate, upon which she was completely reticent. The re­marks of her family, that before her marriage she had been very gay and lively, he hardly credited; his observation wouldn’t bear them out. When he had asked her how his father had died she had absolutely refused to speak of it, had only hinted that there was a terrifying dis­ease of some sort. So that in his dark mid-adoles­cence he had begun to imagine that this disease was probably hereditary, had begun to wonder when it might overtake him also. He would imagine it as sudden and painlessly fatal, a black stifling area of wool dropped over him abruptly; or he would think of it as gradual and excruciat­ing, a blob of soft metal dissolving in acid. And even when his adolescence was gratefully behind him he had never lost completely a secret vague conviction that his days were limited, that a deep bitter end awaited him at some random juncture of his life. This notion accounted in part for his mordant turn of mind, but still it was mainly a symptom: his whole nature was self-­minatory.

  And it was mostly because of this that he had become an active minister, for he would have enjoyed much more, and would have been more at ease in, a purely scholarly life. He would have much preferred the examination of Greek manuscripts and of his own looming conscience to the responsibility—he felt it a heavy responsi­bility—for the welfare of the souls of his little congregation of the First Methodist Church of Afton, North Carolina. His mind wouldn’t let him rest in the leather-bound study. When he considered this inviting possibility a voice warn­ing him that he was choosing a career of self-indulgence spoke in his head, and this voice he heeded without too regretful a delay. In his sen­ior year and then during his years in the seminary he had armed himself the best he knew how to meet the world as an active, even a mili­tant, Christian minister. That he had strange ideas about how to prepare himself to encounter the world was a consequence of his sheltered life. His mother had been understandably pro­tective of him, and her family, curiously, had maintained her attitude. It was as if they shared some of his own premonition about his fate. They had been content somehow—they had seemed relieved—with his choice of profession and had willingly seen him through the semi­nary.

  And despite the unworldliness of his younger life he had made a competent though hardly a thunderously successful minister. Perhaps it was the continued awareness of his own frailty which made him tolerant of the frailties of oth­ers, but his admonishment of the peccadilloes of his congregation—and in the town of Afton they were only peccadilloes—was couched in gentle terms gravely humorous. But the scholar in him would come out. A lecture concerning a histori­cal problem of theology was sometimes offered them for a sermon; and they on their side were tolerant also. Perhaps they were pleased finally at having a preacher with brains, for their toler­ance actually came to something more than that. Perhaps they even interpreted the intent of these scholarly discourses correctly, as ges­tures he wanted to make to indicate that even on the other side, out of the competitive fight which comprised the world they knew, it wasn’t easy; that a faith doesn’t drop as the gentle rain from heaven but is formed in continual intellec­tual and spiritual agony. Also it was simple enough to give a conventional sermonizing point to such discourse, for every genuine moral problem does ultimately impinge on a man’s daily life.

  It was from one of his sermons, in fact, that his present project had emerged. Although the problem had at first been no more than a pre­text for a sermon, when he had later pondered his own words the subjec
t had seized him, and as much time as he could in conscience squeeze from his duties he devoted to a sketchy re­search. In time he decided to write a mono­graph, perhaps a book. He allowed himself a couple of months’ vacation—the sudden inheriting of the farm was an almost unbelievable slice of luck—and from their inconsiderable savings account he had allowed himself three thousand dollars, even though he wasn’t quite certain how all that money was to be utilized. “Three thousand is an outside figure,” he told Sheila. For the sermon he had taken his texts from the First Book of Samuel, “And when they arose early on the morrow morning, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him. Therefore neither the priests of Dagon, nor any that come into Dagon’s house, tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod unto this day.” Then he reminded them of Samson, delivered into the hands of the Philistines by the bitch Delilah. “Then the lords of the Philistines gath­ered them together for to offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god, and to rejoice: for they said, Our god hath delivered Samson our enemy into our hand.” It was that temple of Dagon, he said, which Samson had destroyed with his hands, pulling it down with its pillars. Peter, seeming even taller in his perpendicular robe, pale and angular leaning forward in the pulpit, had informed his not very attentive audience that Dagon was simply one more of the pagan fertility deities; in Phoenicia his name was con­nected with the word dagan, meaning “corn,” though this name finally derived from a Semitic root meaning “fish.” He recalled the description by Milton in the catalogue of fallen angels:

  Next came one

  Who mourn’d in earnest, when the Captive Ark

  Maim’d his brute Image, head and hands lopt off

  In his own Temple, on the grunsel edge,

  Where he fell flat, and sham’d his Worshipers:

  Dagon his Name, Sea Monster, upward Man

  And downward Fish.

  He had noted how the figure of Dagon had at­tached to the sensibilities of Renaissance histo­rians, his story being told by Selden, Sandys, Purchas, Ross, and by Sir Walter Raleigh in his history of the world. The congregation shifted from ham to ham, resentfully itchy under this barrage of verse and unfamiliar names. But Peter had continued to read from his notes, say­ing that the human imagination had been hard put to it to let go this crippled fertility figure. The worship of Dagon had even traveled to America. He read to them from William Brad­ford’s history of the Plymouth colony the story of Mount Wollaston:

  After this they fell to great licentiousness and led a dissolute life, pouring out themselves into all profaneness. And Morton became Lord of Misrule, and maintained (as it were) a School of Atheism. And after they had got some goods into their hands, and got much by trading with the Indians, they spent it as vainly in quaffing and drinking, both wine and strong waters in great excess. … They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse prac­tices. As if they had anew revived and cele­brated the feasts of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians. Morton likewise, to show his poetry composed sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness, and others to the detraction and scandal of some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idol maypole. They changed also the name of their place, and instead of calling it Mount Wollaston they call it Merry-mount, as if this jollity would have lasted ever. But this con­tinued not long, for after Morton was sent for England… shortly after came over that worthy gentleman Mr. John Endecott, who brought over a patent under the broad seal for the govern­ment of Massachusetts. Who, visiting those parts, caused that maypole to be cut down and rebuked them for their profaneness and admonished them to look there should be better walk­ing. So they or others now changed the name of their place again and called it Mount Dagon.

  Here he had closed his notes and in the few minutes remaining he preached in earnest. The worship of Dagon, he said, still persisted in America. The characteristics which had made this god attractive to men were clearly evident in the society that encircled them. Didn’t the Dagon notion of fertility dominate? Frenzied, incessant, unreasoning sexual activity was in­vited on all sides; every entertainment, even the serious entertainment, the arts, seemed to suppose this activity as basis. This blind sexual Bac­chanalia was inevitably linked to money—one had only to think of the omnipresent advertise­ments, with all those girls who alarmed the eye. A mere single example. And wasn’t the power of money finally dependent upon the continued proliferation of product after product, dead ob­jects produced without any thought given to their uses? Weren’t these mostly objects without any truly justifiable need? Didn’t the whole of American commercial culture exhibit this end­less irrational productivity, clear analogue to sexual orgy? And yet productivity without re­gard to eventual need was, Peter maintained, actually unproductivity, it was really a kind of impotence. This was the paradox which the figure of Dagon contained. To worship Dagon was to worship a maimed, a mutilated god, a god to whom “only the stump” remained. Dagon had lost both head and hands, only his loins re­mained; and below the waist he was fish, most unthinking of animals. Dagon was symbol both of fertility and infertility; he represented the fault in mankind to act without reflecting, to do without knowing why, to go, without knowing where. Was it simply coincidence that Merry-mount had changed its name to Mount Dagon after Endicott had chopped down the maypole? Or might it not be a continuation of the worship of crippled sexuality? The ruined Dagon and the chopped maypole mirrored each other too clearly, didn’t they? It couldn’t be coincidence. But even if these manifestations were inde­pendent they still emerged from that human sickness, the worship of uncaring physical discharge, onanism, impotence, nihilism hurtling at a superspeed. It was this unconscious regard that he wished them to root from their hearts. He insisted that a Christian life was of necessity a reflective life, that useless movement, unrest­ing expenditure of substance and spirit, was alien to it. He exhorted them to continual vigi­lance. He admitted that it wasn’t an easy thing he asked.

  Here he ended, and was aware for the first time of the weighty boredom his words had created.

  His congregation sat before him listless as sun-bleached stones. He looked at them tiredly, then looked at Sheila sitting before him in her encouraging front pew. Her yellow hair shone bright, falling over the shoulders of her dark blue dress. She grinned. Her torso rose and fell with the burden of a heavy mock sigh. With the back of her hand she wiped away imaginary sweat from her forehead. …Anger flooded him momentarily. If it was a dull sermon for her, tough luck. It had been for him an earnest try, he had said something that he honestly cared about. His wife, for God’s sake, ought to stand with him.…But the effort was too much after the long sermon and his anger evaporated. He was merely annoyed and tired. He answered her with a resigned shrug and announced the final hymn. “Let us sing number 124. ‘Thou hid­den love of God,” he said. “Let us please sing only the first and last verses.” He reckoned on a long afternoon of relentless teasing—half­-serious—from his bright pretty wife.

  And in some ways he dreaded it. As an intellectual opponent she was formidable, and once she had caught him in an awkward position she wouldn’t let up. This was an attitude of hers he couldn’t help resenting at times, even though he recognized that it was an attitude which his own nature needed for any kind of wholesome bal­ance. If he had been deliberately shopping for temperaments, he couldn’t have got better than Sheila’s—wry, tough, at times baldly sarcastic—as an antidote for his own pessimistic nature, which was too often unwillingly pompous. Mar­riage with a gloomier, less sceptical nature would surely have been consummated in a sui­cide pact. Sheila simply refused to take him as seriously as he took himself. “All that nonsense…” He couldn’t help, in a way, envying her her
full generosity of movement and feel­ing; but he was simply not like that, he was too knotted, ponderous. She would twit him then, he took it as one takes a too-acid medicine: it tastes so bitter, it must do some good. He would like to have the barrier broken, that wall be­tween him and the ordinariness of life. This he genuinely wanted, to prank and disport in the tepid waters of dailiness, of pettiness, of the trivia which comprise existences. He would like to spend hours dawdling over his morning coffee, or choosing which socks to buy or which greeting card to send. But he was as he was, not even Sheila could break that down. An ener­vating sense of guilt drove him to study, to learn, to preach, to visit, to harass, to perform good works. He could not answer the question whether works properly good could proceed from an exaggerated feeling of guilt; neither could he suppress the question.

  But there was Sheila. She had married him as soon as he was out of seminary, though their contact in those four years had been through letters almost entirely. The courtship and actual wooing had gone on before, when he was at the university where she was a student. She had lasted out the four-year wait easily enough, rather gaily; and he couldn’t help wondering if her nature didn’t demand his as much as his demanded hers. His faults were the faults of so­lidity, and perhaps the solidity was what she needed to attach to. It might be all too easy for her free humor to fog away into frivolity. A comforting thought, her need for him; made him feel less parasitic.…She was a fine girl, would be a fine mother, but though they had been married four years—he was now thirty-two—there were no children. The childlessness both­ered Peter; he felt it almost as a debt he owed and which he might be called upon to pay at any time, any moment when he would be unpre­pared. Simply one more instance of the way his impending fate would catch him up helpless.