by Alice Munro
Another story: once the Red Front Grocery had forgotten to put a pound of butter in her order, and she had come after the grocery boy with a hatchet.
Christ, have mercy upon us.
Also that week I did a vulgar thing. I asked God to prove himself by answering a prayer. The prayer had to do with something called Household Science, which we had at school once a week, on Thursday afternoons. In Household Science we learned to knit and crochet and embroider and run a sewing machine, and everything we did was more impossible than the last thing; my hands would be slimy with sweat and the Household Science room itself with its three ancient sewing machines and its cutting tables and battered dummies looked to me like an arena of torture. And so it was. Mrs. Forbes the teacher was a fat little woman with the painted face of a celluloid doll and with most girls she was jolly. But my stupidity, my stubby blundering hands crumpling up the grimy handkerchief I was supposed to be hemming, or the miserable crocheting, put her into a dancing rage.
“Look at the filthy work, filthy work! I’ve heard about you, you think you’re so clever with your memory work (I was famous for memorizing poems fast) and here you take stitches any six-year-old would be ashamed of!”
Now she had me trying to learn to thread the sewing machine. And I could not learn. We were making aprons, with appliqued tulips. Some girls were already finishing the tulips or doing the hem and I had not even sewn the waistband on yet, because I could not get the sewing machine threaded and Mrs. Forbes said she was not going to show me again. It did not do any good when she showed me anyhow; her quick hands in front of me astonished and blinded and paralyzed me, with their close flashes of contempt.
So I prayed: please let me not have to thread the sewing machine on Thursday afternoon. I said this over several times in my head, quickly, seriously, unemotionally, as if trying out a spell. I did not use any special pleading or bargaining. I did not ask for anything extraordinary, like a fire in the Household Science room or Mrs. Forbes slipping on the street and breaking a leg; nothing but a little unspecific intervention.
Nothing happened. She had not forgotten about me. At the beginning of the class I was sent to the machine. I sat there trying to figure out where to put the thread—I did not have any hope of putting it in the right place but had to put it some place, to show her I was trying—and she came and stood behind me, breathing disgustedly; as usual my legs began to shake, and shook so badly I moved the pedal and the machine began to run, weakly, with no thread in it.
“All right, Del,” said Mrs. Forbes. I was surprised at her voice, which was not kind, certainly, but not angry, only worn out.
“I said all right. You can get up.”
She picked up the pieces of the apron, that I had desperately basted together, crumpled them up and threw them in the waste-basket.
“You cannot learn to sew,” she said, “any more than a person who is tone-deaf can learn to sing. I have tried and I am beaten. Come with me.”
She handed me a broom. “If you know how to sweep I want you to sweep this room and throw the scraps in the wastebasket, and be responsible for keeping the floor clean, and when you are not doing that you can sit at the table back here and—memorize poetry, for all I care.”
I was weak with relief and joy, in spite of public shame, which I was used to. I swept the floor conscientiously and then got my library book about Mary Queen of Scots and read, disgraced, but unburdened, alone at the back of the room. I thought at first that what had happened was plainly miraculous, an answer to my prayer. But presently I began to wonder; suppose I hadn’t prayed, suppose it was going to happen anyway? I had no way of knowing; there was no control for my experiment. Minute by minute I turned more niggardly, ungrateful. How could I be sure? And surely too it was rather petty, rather obvious of God to concern Himself so quickly with such a trivial request? It was almost as if He were showing off. I wanted Him to move in a more mysterious way.
I wanted to tell somebody but I could not tell Naomi. I had asked her if she believed in God and she had said promptly and scornfully, “Well of course I do, I’m not like your old lady. Do you think I want to go to Hell?” I never discussed it with her again.
I picked on my brother Owen to tell. He was three years younger than I was. At one time he had been impressionable and trusting. Once out on the farm we had a shelter of old boards, that we played house in, and he sat on the end of a board and I served him mountain ash berries, telling him they were his cornflakes. He ate them all. While he was still eating it occurred to me they might be poisonous, but I did not tell him, for reasons of my own prestige and the importance of the game, and afterwards I prudently decided not to tell anyone else. Now he had learned to skate, and went to hockey practice, and leaned over the bannisters and spat on my head, an ordinary boy.
But there were angles, still, from which he looked frail and young, pursuits of his that seemed to me lost and hopeless. He entered contests. This was my mother’s nature showing in him, her boundless readiness to take up the challenges and promises of the outside world. He believed in prizes; telescopes he could see the craters of the moon through, magicians’ kits with which he could make things disappear, chemistry sets that would enable him to manufacture explosives. He would have been an alchemist, if he had known about it. However, he was not religious.
He sat on the floor of his room cutting out tiny cardboard figures of hockey players, which he would then arrange in teams, and play games with; such godlike games he played with trembling absorption, and then seemed to me to inhabit a world so far from my own (the real one), a world so irrelevant, heartbreakingly flimsy in its deceptions.
I sat on the bed behind him.
“Owen.”
He didn’t answer; when he was playing his games he never wanted anyone around.
“What do you think happens to someone when they die?”
“I don’t know,” said Owen mutinously.
“Do you believe God keeps your soul alive? Do you know what your soul is? Do you believe in God?”
Owen turned his head and gave me a trapped look. He had nothing to hide, nothing to show but his pure-hearted indifference.
“You better believe in God,” I said. “Listen.” I told him about my prayer, and Household Science. He listened unhappily. The need I felt was not in him. It made me angry to discover this; he seemed dazed, defenceless but resilient, a hard rubber ball. He would listen, if I insisted, agree with me, if I insisted on that, but in his heart, I thought, he was not paying any attention. Stupidity.
I would often hector him like this from now on when I could get him alone. Don’t tell Mother, I said. He was all I had to try my faith out on; I had to have somebody. His deep lack of interest, the satisfaction he seemed to take in a world without God were what I really could not bear, and kept hammering at; also I felt that because he was younger, and had been in my power so long, he had an obligation to follow me; for him not to acknowledge it was a sign of insurrection.
In my room with the door shut I read from the Book of Common Prayer.
Sometimes walking along the street I would shut my eyes (the way Owen and I used to do, playing blind) and say to myself—frowning, praying—“God. God. God.” Then I would imagine for a few precarious seconds a dense bright cloud descending on Jubilee, wrapping itself around my skull. But my eyes flew open in alarm; I was not able to let that in, or me out. Also I was afraid of bumping into something, being seen, making a fool of myself.
Good Friday came. I was going out. My mother came into the hall and said, “What have you got your beret on for?”
It was time to take a stand. “I’m going to church.”
“There is no church.”
“I’m going to the Anglican Church. They have church on Good Friday.”
My mother had to sit down on the steps. She gave me as searching, pale, exasperated a look as she had examined me with a year before when she found a drawing Naomi and I had done in my scribbler, of a fat naked lady wi
th balloonbreasts and a huge, inky, sprouting nest of pubic hair.
“Do you know what Good Friday is in memory of?”
“Crucifixion,” I said tersely.
“That’s the day Christ died for our sins. That’s what they tell us. Now. Do you believe that?”
“Yes.”
“Christ died for our sins,” said my mother, jumping up. In the hall mirror she peered aggressively at her own dim face. “Well well well. Redeemed by the blood. That is a lovely notion. You might as well take the Aztecs cutting out live hearts because they thought the sun wouldn’t rise and set if they didn’t. Christianity is no better. What do you think of a God that asks for blood? Blood blood blood. Listen to their hymns, that’s all they’re ever about. What about a God who isn’t satisfied until he has got somebody hanging on a cross for six hours, nine hours, whatever it was? If I was God I wouldn’t be so bloodthirsty. Ordinary people wouldn’t be so blood-thirsty. I don’t count Hitler. At one time maybe they would be but not now. Do you know what I’m saying, do you know what I’m leading up to?”
“No,” I said honestly.
“God was made by man! Not the other way around! God was made by man. Man at a lower and bloodthirstier stage of his development than he is at now, we hope. Man made God in his own image. I’ve argued that with ministers. I’ll argue it with anybody. I’ve never met anybody who could argue against it and make sense.”
“Can I go?”
“I’m not stopping you,” said my mother, though she had actually moved in front of the door. “Go and get your fill of it. You’ll see I’m right. Maybe you take after my mother.” She looked hard in my face for traces of the religious fanatic. “If you do, I suppose its out of my hands.”
I was not discouraged by my mother’s arguments, not so much as I would have been if they had come from someone else. Nevertheless, crossing town, I looked for proof of the opposite point of view. I took simple comfort from the fact that the stores were locked, the blinds down in all their windows. That proved something, didn’t it? If I knocked on the doors of all the houses along my route and asked a question—Did Christ die for our sins?—the answer, no doubt startled and embarrassed, would be yes.
I realized that I did not care a great deal, myself, about Christ dying for our sins. I only wanted God. But if Christ dying for our sins was the avenue to God, I would work on it.
Good Friday was, unsuitably, a mild sunny sort of day, with icicles dripping and crashing, roofs steaming, little streams running down the streets. Sunlight poured through the ordinary glass windows of the church. I was late, because of my mother. The minister was already up in front. I slid into the back pew and the lady in the velvet turban, Mrs. Sherriff, gave me a white angry look; perhaps not angry, just magnificently startled; it was as if I had sat down beside an eagle on its perch.
I was heartened to see her, though. I was glad to see them all—the six or eight or ten people, real people, who had put on their hats and left their houses and walked through the streets crossing rivulets of melted snow and presented themselves here; they would not do that without a reason.
I wanted to find a believer, a true believer, on whom I could rest my doubts. I wanted to watch and take heart from such a person, not talk to them. At first I had thought it might be Mrs. Sherriff, but she would not do; her craziness disqualified her. My believer must be luminously sane.
O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for thy Name’s sake.
O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for thine honour.
Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.
I set myself to think of Christ’s sufferings. I held my hands together in such a way that I could press a single fingernail with all possible force into each palm. I dug and twisted but could not even get blood; I felt abashed, knowing this did not make me a participant in suffering. God, if He had any taste, would despise such foolishness (but had He? Look at the things that saints had done, and got approval for). He would know what I was really thinking, and trying to beat down in my mind. It was: were Christ’s sufferings really that bad?
Were they that bad, when you knew, and He knew, and everybody knew, that He would rise up whole and bright and everlasting and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty from whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead? Many people—not all, perhaps, or even most people, but quite a few—would submit their flesh to similar pains if they could be sure of getting what He got, afterwards. Many had, in fact; saints and martyrs.
All right, but there was a difference. He was God; it was more of a comedown, more of a submission, for Him. Was He God, or God’s earthly son only, at that time? I could not get it straight. Did He understand how the whole thing was being done on purpose, and it would all be all right in the end, or was His Godness temporarily blacked out, so that He saw only this collapse?
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
After the long psalm with the prophecies in it about the raiment, and casting lots, the minister went up into the pulpit and said he would preach a short sermon on the last words of Christ on the cross. The very thing I had been thinking of. But it turned out there were more last words than the ones I knew about. He started off with I thirst, which showed, he said, that Christ suffered in body just as much as we would in the same situation, not a bit less, and He was not ashamed to admit it, and ask for help, and give the poor soldiers a chance of obtaining grace, with the sponge soaked in vinegar. Woman, behold thy son … son, behold thy mother, showed that his last or almost his last thoughts were for others, arranging for them to be a comfort to each other when He was gone (though never really gone). Even in the hour of His agony and passion He did not forget human relationships, how beautiful and important they were. Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise showed of course his continuing concern for the sinner, the wrongdoer cast out by society and hanging there on the companion cross.
O Lord who hatest nothing that thou hast made and … desirest not the death of a sinner but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live—
But why—I could not stop this thinking though I knew it could bring me no happiness—why should God hate anything that He had made? If He was going to hate it, why make it? And if He had made everything the way He wanted it then nothing was to blame for being the way it was, and this more or less threw out, didn’t it, the whole idea of sin? So why should Christ have to die for our sins? The sermon was having a bad effect on me; it made me bewildered and argumentative. It even made me feel, though I could not admit it, a distaste for Christ Himself, because of the way His perfections were being continually pointed out.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Briefly, the minister said, oh very briefly, Jesus had lost touch with God. Yes, it had happened, even to Him. He had lost the connection, and then in the darkness He had cried out in despair. But this too was part of the plan, it was necessary. It was so we should know in our own blackest moments that our doubts, our misery had been shared by Christ Himself, and then, knowing this, our doubts would all the more quickly pass.
But why? Why should they all the more quickly pass? Suppose that was the last true cry of Christ, the last true thing ever heard of Him? We had to at least suppose that, didn’t we? We had to consider it. Suppose He cried that, and died, and never did rise again, never did discover it was all God’s difficult drama? There was suffering. Yes; think of Him suddenly realizing; it was not true. None of it was true. Pain of torn hands and feet was nothing to that. To look through the slats of the world, having come all that way, and say what He had said, and then see—nothing. Talk about that! I cried inwardly to the minister. Oh, talk about that, drag it into the open, and then—defeat it!
But we do what we can, and the minister could not do any more.
I met Mrs. Sherriff on the street a few days later. I was by myself this time.
“I know you. What are you doing all the time at the Anglican Church? I thought
you were United.”
WHEN MOST OF THE SNOW had melted and the river had gone down, Owen and I went out the Flats Road, separately, on Saturdays, to the farm. The house, where Uncle Benny had been living all winter and my father had been living most of the time, except for those weekends when he came in to stay with us, was so dirty that it no longer had to be a house at all; it was like some sheltered extension of the out-of-doors. The pattern of the kitchen linoleum was lost; dirt itself made a pattern. Uncle Benny said to me, “Now here’s the cleaning-lady, just the thing we need,” but I did not think so. The whole place smelled of fox. There would be no fire in the stove till evening and the door stood open. Outside were crows cawing over the muddy fields, the river high and silver, the pattern of the horizon exactly, magically the same as remembered and forgotten and remembered. The foxes were nervous, yelping, because it was the time of year the females had their pups. Owen and I were not allowed to go near the pens.
Owen was swinging on the rope under the ash tree, where our swing had been last summer.
“Major killed a sheep!”
Major was our dog, now thought of as Owen’s dog, though he did not pay any particular attention to Owen; Owen paid it to him. He was a big golden-brown mongrel collie, who had grown too lazy last summer even to chase cars, but napped in the shade; awake or asleep, he had a slow senatorial sort of dignity. And now he was chasing sheep; he had taken up criminality in his old age, just as a proud and hitherto careful old senator might publicly take up vice. Owen and I went to have a look at him, Owen telling on the way that the sheep belonged to the Potters, whose land adjoined ours, and that the Potter boys had seen Major, from their truck, and had stopped and jumped over fences and yelled but Major had separated his sheep from the others and kept right on after it and killed it.