by Неизвестный
At that instant the Presence launched its hate again. Like a physical thing, it attacked him. It sent stinging talons into his mind and will, stabbing deep at the root of his determination, at some inner sensitive, delicate part of him where all his pain and all his pleasure lived.
This was the Clash that Conor had analyzed so well for Peter. This was the climax of his one-to-one struggle. Peter made the sign of the cross. He knew: now one of them had to yield; one would be victor. He had to hold. He had to refuse to despair. Refuse disbelief. Refuse damnation. Refuse fear. Refuse. Refuse. Refuse. Hold on. These came like automatic commands to him from his inmost self.
His first desperate thrust was to switch his mind toward any lifeline-any beauty or truth he had known and experienced: the cry of seagulls off Dooahcarrig in Kerry; the rhythmic pattern of nimble feet at winter dances; Mae's smile; the security of his father's house; the calm summer evenings he had spent off the coast of Aran Island looking at the Connemara mountains behind Galway City, purple masses welling up in a shining gold vault of sky in haze.
But as quick as any image arose, it dried like a drop of water in a flame. All his internal images of loyalty, authority, hope, legitimacy, concern, gentleness shriveled and faded. His imagination was burning with an overheated despair and his mind could not help him. Only his will locked both mind and imagination into an immobility that pained and agonized him.
But then the Presence turned silently on his will in a slash of naked adversity. For the others present, there was little to go on: no sound except Peter's heavy breathing and the shuffling of their legs as they endeavored to keep their balance and hold Marianne down; no sensation beyond the straining of Marianne's body against their hands. The attack on Peter was a fury beating like sharp hailstones on a tin roof, filling all his awareness with a ceaseless din of fears that paralyzed his will and mind. If only he could breathe more easily, he thought. Or if only he could pierce that contempt.
Dimly he saw the candles sputtering on the night table and glinting on the crucified figure on the cross.
“Rimimb'r, lad, his proide. That's his weak heel. His proide! Git him on his proide!”
With Conor's voice in his memory, Peter blurted: “You have been vanquished, vanquished, Smiler, by one who did not fear to be lowly, to be killed. Depart! Smiler! Depart! You have been vanquished by a bloodied will. You cheat. Jesus is your master. . .”
The others present heard him croaking the words as they held Marianne down on the bed. A babel set in: everyone was affected. The chest of drawers rocked noisily back and forth, its handles clanked discordantly. The door to the room swung and banged, swung and banged, swung and banged. Marianne's body shirt split down the middle, exposing her breasts and middle. Her jeans tore at the seams. Her voice rose louder and louder in a series of slow, staccato screams. Great welts appeared across her torso, groin, legs, and face, as if an invisible horsewhip was thrashing her unmercifully. She struggled and kicked and heaved and spat. Now she was incontinent, urinating and excreting all over the bed, filling their nostrils with acrid odor.
Peter kept murmuring: “He vanquished you. He vanquished you. He vanquished you. . .” But the pain in his will struggling against that will began to numb him; and his throat was dry. His eyes blurred over. His eardrums were splitting. He felt dirty beyond any human cleansing. He was slipping, slipping, slipping.
“Jesus! Mary!. . . Conor,” he whispered as his knees buckled, “it's all lost. I can't hold. Jesus!. . .”
Seven thousand miles away across ocean and continent, in Rome, the doctor nodded to the nurse as he stepped out of Father Conor's room. He told the father superior there was no point in calling the ambulance. The damage was too massive this time. It would be a matter of mere hours.
It was Conor's third stroke. He had been fine all that evening. Then in the small hours of the morning, he had called his superior on the house phone from his room: “Fatherr, I'm goin' teh cause yeh throubel agin.” When they reached Conor, they found him slumped over his desk, his right hand clutching a crucifix.
“Father, it's all right. It's me. It's all over.”
Peter's younger colleague helped Peter to his feet. Peter had fallen on his knees and bent over until his forehead touched the floor. By the bed, Peter saw the doctor was listening to Marianne's heartbeat with a stethoscope. Her father was stroking her hand and talking to her through his tears: “It's all right, my baby. It's all right. You're through. You're safe, baby. It's all right.”
The bank manager had gone outside to talk with Marianne's mother and brother. Marianne was quiet now, breathing regularly. The bed was a shambles. The ex-policeman opened the window, and the sounds of traffic entered the room. It was around 10:15 P.M.
“I must phone Conor early,” Peter said to his colleague. Then, “I wonder what else happened today?” He looked over at Marianne again. “Zio's visit can't be all.”
Father James looked at him dumbly, not catching the train of his thought. He would never understand exorcists, he felt.
Then Peter continued: “Is it because love is one throughout the world, and hate is one throughout the world?” Peter addressed the seeming vague question to no one in particular.
The younger priest turned away from the pain he saw on Peter's face; it was more than he could take just now. “I will get you some coffee,” he said brusquely, feeling the hot tears at the back of his own eyes.
But Peter was looking out the window at the night sky. His mind was far away, his senses almost asleep with fatigue.
Down below Marianne's window, the crowds were returning from Yankee Stadium. Zio at that moment was standing in a darkened gallery of the Vatican Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, gazing at Michelangelo's Pietd: the dead Jesus in the arms of his mother. Television cameras carried his voice to millions that night: “We bless all of you, invoking upon you an abundance of heavenly blessings and graces.”
Father Bones and Mister Natch
The marriage was to take place at 8:00 A.M. on the Massepiq seashore, just around Dutchman's Point, New England. It was already a bright and sunny March day at 7:30 A.M. as the first guests arrived. A landward breeze, like the breath of the sun from the East, blew clusters of white clouds across the blue morning sky and juggled the sea with ripples. The tide, almost fully in and about to ebb, was like a formless giant exhaling and inhaling. It sent wave after wave in an unbroken flow to the long shoreline. Each one broke there with a sharp tap on the sand, spread out a running tapestry of whitened water with a rustling whisper, and then was sucked rasping back over sand and pebbles.
This music of the waters and the thin piping of the wind was a quiet but powerful rhythm that ebbed and flowed, uninterrupted by any other sound. As the guests came, they fell under its spell. It was the voice of a very ancient world that had always existed, always moved, and now seemed to be putting them, the intruders, on notice: “This is my world you have entered. But since this is the morning of man and woman, my children, I will pause a while. This is a new beginning.”
It was, in fact, exactly the sort of morning that Father Jonathan had hoped for. Everything was natural. The only perfume was the air, crisp with a little chill, fresh with salt, exhilarating with light. The only sanctuary was the sharply shelving beach, with the sand dunes behind it, the sea in front of it, its roof the wide dome of the sky. The only altar was formed by the barefoot bride and bridegroom standing where the waters spread a constantly renewed carpet of foam and spindrift around their feet. The only music was the sounding sea and breeze. The only mystery was this beginning undertaken by two human beings in view of an unseen future.
Father Jonathan arrived last. Punctually at eight he began the ceremony. Barefoot like the bride and the bridegroom, wearing a white sleeveless shirt over his denims and a gold-colored stole around his neck, he stood at the edge of the tide, the sea to his right and the land to his left. In front of him stood Hilda and Jerome, the boy and the girl to be married, both in their e
arly twenties. She, in a white ankle-length dress gathered at her waist by a belt woven of long grasses, her hair parted in the middle, falling down on her shoulders. He, wearing a white shirt over blue shorts. Their faces were quiet and calm, swept clean of any trouble.
Hilda and Jerome had their eyes fixed on Jonathan's as he began to speak in a loud and exulting voice which, bell-like, carried to the ears of the 40 or so people standing some yards away at the edge of the sand dunes. “Here on the sand by the sea, here where all great human things have always begun, we stand to witness another great beginning. Hilda and Jerome are about to promise each other to each other in the greatest of all human beginnings.”
A pleasant sense of anticipation ran through the listeners. Athletic, bronzed, graceful, deliberate in his movements, taller than either the boy or the girl in front of him, golden hair touching his shoulders, Jonathan was in complete, even dramatic command of the situation. His eyes had the peculiar blue sheen you cannot believe to be natural until you see it. A fire of blue seemed to burn in them, giving off a hypnotic brilliance. They lacked the warm sentiment of brown eyes; but a burnished patina prevented you from reading them, and this created their mystery.
Only one thing marred Jonathan's appearance. As he gestured grandly and raised his hand in an initial blessing, some of the guests noticed it: his right index finger was crooked. He could not straighten it. But it was a little thing swallowed up in the golden-blue morning, in the blaze of Jonathan's eyes, in the lilt of the moving sea.
As Jonathan's voice rang out, and nature kept up its endless rhythm in apparent unison, only one person seemed incongruous. He stood at the back and to one side of the guests, staring intently through Polaroid glasses at the boy and girl. Lanky, clad in sweater and slacks, with both hands thrust in his trousers pockets, he was the only one wearing a hat, a black hat.
“Funny character. Wonder who he is?” Jerome's father whispered to his wife. But the parents forgot about him momentarily, and no one else particularly noticed him as Father Jonathan's sermon reached its climax before the actual vows.
“. . . both are entering this mystery. And both are mirrors of nature's fullness—its womb, its fertility, its nurturing milk, its powerful seed, its supreme ecstasy, its nestling sleep, its mystery of oneness, and the long mysteries of the immortality it alone confers—if we are one with nature and participants in its sacrament of life and of death. As the perfect man, Jesus, our model, was.”
The man in the black hat stirred uneasily, leaning forward to catch every detail, all the while his eyes on the boy and the girl.
Father Jonathan flung a smoldering gaze over the guests to his left. “Many have sought to rob him, our supreme example, of his human value for us.” His voice throbbed with deep emotion. “To cap his glorious life with a weak, milk-and-water ending. What is all this dreadful chicanery of his supposed resurrection but a cheat? If he died, he died. Completely. Really. What sort of sacrifice and therefore what sort of love for us was there if he died to live again? Thus to rob the sacrifice of its very sting and its true glory and to rob him and us of all true human nobility—is not this the cruel joke of the happy ending they have attached to his heroic death? He, the supreme hero? Making a Grimm's fairy tale out of the greatest story ever told.
“You, Jerome and Hilda,” again looking at them with pride, “you will love his mystery of human unity; and, in time, like him, you will face death as he did, human, noble, and go back to nature, to be cemented into its eternal oneness where Jesus went with bowed head but triumphant.”
By now the man in the black hat had moved in front of the little crowd of guests.
Jonathan launched into the marriage ceremony proper. “Look now, Hilda and Jerome, all nature is going to pause for one brief instant to witness your vows.” A sweeping gesture took in all the scene, the crooked index finger jabbing oddly askew. “All things, the wind, the sun, the sea, the earth, all will stop in their ways. . .”
Jonathan broke off. He seemed to be having difficulty in drawing his breath. He gulped. His face flushed with the effort to continue. Then he managed to take up again, dictating word for word to Hilda.
“With all my heart, I do take you. . .”
“With all my heart, I do take you,” Hilda echoed in clear, confident tones.
“As my honored husband. . .”
“As my honored husband. . .”
“Within the mystery of nature. . .”
“Within the mystery of nature. . .”
“To have and to hold. . .”
“To have and to hold. . .”
“In life and in death. . .”
“In life and in death. . .”
“As God's womb and pleasure. . .”
“As God's womb and pleasure. . .”
“For the glory of our humanness. . .”
“For the glory of our humanness. . .”
“As Jesus before us. . .”
“As Jesus before us. . .”
“World of living and dead. . .”
“World of living and dead. . .”
“Amen.”
“Amen.”
Hilda slipped the ring onto Jerome's finger. The guests stirred. Some had become unaccountably tense and could not take their eyes off Jonathan. Afterward, some remarked that it was as if a disfigurement had begun to show through in him.
The man in the black hat, now in front of the dunes and apart from the crowd, still watched intently.
Jerome looked at Jonathan and waited for the words of his vow to Hilda. Hilda's eyes were on Jerome. All nature, indeed, had seemingly stopped for her. For the first time she felt at one with life, with the world, with her own body.
Jonathan was again struggling with some impediment. His body was stiff. His chest swelled. At last he was able to fill his lungs, and he started to dictate Jerome's words.
“With this ring. . .”
“With this ring. . .” Jerome took up the words.
“I do take you. . .”
“I do take you. . .”
“As my dearly beloved wife. . .”
“As my dearly beloved wife. . .”
“As you have given me. . .”
“As you have given me. . .”
“The wonder and the mystery. . .”
“The wonder and the mystery. . .”
Jerome waited for the next line. But Jonathan was suddenly again almost purple with effort. His blue eyes were bulging now, showing large, terror-ridden whites. His hands, which had been folded across his chest solemnly, now were tensed by his sides, opening and shutting convulsively. He opened his mouth and rasped: “Of being one with nature. . .”
“Of being one with nature. . .” Jerome repeated.
“And-and-and. . .” Jonathan stammered.
Hilda's head turned in alarm. Jonathan's voice was climbing on each syllable toward hysteria. It seemed that every other sound had died out, as everyone hung on Jonathan's words.
“And-of be-being one with Je-Jes-Jeeeesus”—Jonathan's voice broke into a screeching crescendo that split the air. “JESUS!” The name was a curse cracking on every ear. His face twisted into an ugliness that froze Hilda with horror.
In a flash Jonathan was on top of Hilda, his outstretched arms catching her under the arms. Now, in his onrush, he was carrying her out bodily into the water, groaning and muttering wildly to himself. He pushed her head down, keeping her face beneath the surface and straddling her body as she kicked and struggled.
The lightning speed of Jonathan's actions and their crazy incongruity had frozen everybody. For a split second they did not grasp what was happening. Then a woman screamed with the unmistakable, high-pitched warning of mortal danger.
Within seconds half a dozen men ran and tore Jonathan's hands away from Hilda, struck him across the neck, lifted him off her, and threw him full length on the beach. He lay there thrashing and kicking for a moment, then went still.
Jerome and Hilda's father lifted Hilda clear of the
water; she was gasping for air and sobbing, her long dress trailing rivulets of sand and water. They laid her down on the high ground among the sand dunes, her head pillowed on her mother's lap. Gradually she recovered her breath, crying uncontrollably. Jerome knelt by her, dazed, his mouth open, his face utterly white, incapable of any word.
Down on the beach, Jonathan lay flat on the sand. He stirred and groaned, turning over on his side. Then, lifting himself up on one elbow, he clambered slowly and fitfully to his feet and swayed unsteadily. His back and side were caked with sand. The water still dripped from his long hair and his clothes. His eyes were bloodshot. His head was lowered. He blinked in the sunlight at the hard stares of the guests ranged around him. He was at bay.
Nobody said anything at first. Then a sharp, metallic voice broke in. “If you will allow me, sir,” addressing Hilda's father, “I am in charge here now, sir.” The authority and confidence in that voice attracted all eyes to the speaker. It was the strange man, his black hat off now, revealing a lean, not quite youthful face full of lines, beneath a full head of gray hair tousled by the wind. He removed his sunglasses and with a limp came closer to Jonathan, looking steadily at him. Then he said quietly: “You and I have an important appointment now, Father Jonathan.” He paused; then, with a fresh edge to his voice, “The sooner the better.” The black hat was on his head again. He stretched out his hand to Jonathan.
No one spoke. No one objected. Perhaps all were relieved that someone was taking over.
The man spoke again. “The sun will be high in a couple of hours. We have work to do that will not wait. Come!”
Jonathan blinked for a moment. Then shakily he put the hand with the crooked finger into the other man's open palm. They turned their backs on the sea. Hand in hand, Jonathan stumbling and swaying, the other man limping, they walked up over the dunes and across to the dirt road where the cars were parked, and stopped by a station wagon. They stood there for a moment. The guests could see the man talking to Jonathan. Jonathan, half-bent and leaning on the door handle of the station wagon, was listening, his head bowed. He nodded violently. Then they both got in.