The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

by Peter de Vries

  “The virgin birth business was slipped in by a later writer, prolly, after the doctrine had been cooked up by the church,” said Louie, joining us.

  A gasp went around the kitchen table, at which now a small congregation sat. Men stiffened in their black suits, and women shook their heads as heresy darkened into blasphemy. Here under one roof were two candidates for the dread afgescheidenen, a term as dire as “purge” to citizens of a later absolutism. My mother poured coffee with a trembling hand; my nearly blind grandmother, who lived with us at the time, was busily trying to sweep cigar burns in the oilcloth into a crumber; my grandfather went out to the front porch, where he stood scratching himself in a manner said to be depreciating property values. My uncle shook a finger threateningly in Louie’s face. “I’ll pray for you.”

  “Do dat,” said Louie, whose Chicago street diction was being but slowly refined by influences on the University Midway.

  “That damnable school where they teach you such things.”

  “Pa get his from there? We can read for ourselves, is the thing, and I’ll tell you this about the Bible. You don’t have to believe it’s infallible to get something out of it, in fact it’s only after you’ve dropped all that geklets that you can begin to appreciate it as great literature.”

  A special murmur of dismay was excited by this, for the heresy that the Bible was great literature was one the clergy were trying particularly to spike. Dr. Berkenbosch, who had just arrived to look in on my grandmother, stood flattened against the kitchen door, his eyes closed but rolling under their lids as well we knew, wishing he had not come. “Next he’ll call Thy word poetry,” my uncle said. “He’s going to call it gracefully written. Forgive him, O Lord, I ask it in advance.”

  “The Book of Job is the greatest drama ever struck off by the hand of man. Just terrific theater. Greater than Aeschylus, prolly.”

  “Down on our knees, shall we, everyone, and try yet to pluck this brand from the burning?”

  The hearers were too stricken to move from their chairs, in which they stiffened as though charges of electric current were being passed through their frames. Moans ran around the table, heads were shaken.

  “He says it’s great drama. Sheer theater—God’s word. Hemelse Vader.”

  Whatever the theater in Job, there was no lack of it in our kitchen that night. Above the Greek chorus of Dutch lamentations could be heard my brother exclaiming, “It’s your silly theologies that have made religion impossible and mucked up people’s lives till you can’t call it living any more! Look at Ma! Look at Pa!”

  Look at them indeed. Our mother was wiping the table with one hand and her eyes with the other. Our father had his elbows on the table and seemed to be trying to extricate his head from his hands as from a porthole, or vise, into which it had been inadvertently thrust. My uncle put his face up close to Louie’s and said, “You’re talking to a servant of God!”

  “You’re talking to someone who hasn’t let the brains God gave him rot, and doesn’t intend to!”

  Such a scene may seem, to households devoid of polemic excitement, to lie outside credulity, but it was a common one in ours. Now when I am myself no longer assailed by doubts, being rather lashed by certainties, I can look back on it with a perspective quite lacking in my view of it then, for my teeth were chattering. We were a chosen people, more so than the Jews, who had “rejected the cornerstone,” our concept of Calvinist election reinforced by that of Dutch supremacy. My mother even then sometimes gave the impression that she thought Jesus was a Hollander. Not that our heroes did not include men of other extractions and other faiths. Several years after the Scopes trial, we were still aggressively mourning the defeat of William Jennings Bryan, and it took very little time for the subject of evolution to come into the argument.

  “What about a First Cause?” my uncle said. “Where did the world come from if God didn’t make it?”

  “What about vestigial organs?” my brother countered. “The only reason you can wiggle your ears better than the rest of us is the muscles left over from the olden days haven’t atrophied as much as most people’s. You’ve also got a set to swing a tail with, pal, take it from me. Not to speak of over a hundred other remnants from wisdom teeth to hair you’ve got no use for now but once retained body heat for four-footed beasts.”

  “Down on our knees, shall we?”

  “We’ve been through that stage.”

  “Why haven’t I got a tail, if I’ve still got the muscles to wag it?”

  “Don’t think you once didn’t. Which brings us to the embryo, if vestigial organs don’t convince you. Do you know what ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ means?”

  “I am not impressed by big words,” said my uncle, who was always ready enough to bandy “predestination” and “infralapsarianism.”

  “Means the individual enacts in miniature the entire evolutionary history of the race, beginning with conception.” Louie turned to my aunt, who happened to be conveniently pregnant. “How far along is Aunt Wilhelmina here?”

  “Will you shut your foul mouth?”

  “Seven months? Then the gill clefts her kid had at two—a relic of the fish stage, you see—are closed up. The breathing apparatus of land animals has developed, pal. The notochord has become the vertebrate spine. Your kid has its feet curled in toward each other, sweetheart, like hands, capable of grasping branches. The tail it has had all these months will by birth have withered away, though occasionally a human mammal is born with one. You can talk yourself blue in the face, but you and Bryan and Billy Sunday and anybody else you care to name are walking museums of what you deny, while Aunt Wilhelmina is carrying inside her a synopsis of the story thus far. Your child is about to come down out of the trees.”

  My uncle turned and, for a moment, seemed to shift his protest to his wife, or at least to evaluate her with new eyes, as one capable of betraying his most cherished principles and possibly even threatening their livelihood in thus carting about in her middle a digest of Natural Selection. Louie hurried on.

  “More dramatic throwbacks are harelips harking back to piscine ancestors with that nostril formation, dog-faced boys seen in circus sideshows—”

  Here a shriek from my aunt herself brought an abrupt change in the course events had thus far taken. Running from the room, she cried, “Wat scheelt u?” (What ails you?) “Talking about those things in front of a woman who’s carrying!” Several women hurried into the parlor behind her, poor choices to calm hysteria since they shared all too keenly the peasant superstitions from which it sprang, and were in a few instances in a delicate condition themselves.

  Suddenly the whole house was a boiling uproar. People ran back and forth from kitchen to parlor like victims of a panic with no leader. Hands soothed my heaving aunt, loosening her clothes so she could breathe, or were simply wrung to the accompaniment of rolled eyes and deploring clucks. Doc Berkenbosch seized his bag and flew into the parlor, closing the door after pushing all the men and some of the women back into the passage like a subway attendant. My uncle wheeled on Louie.

  “You! I’m surprised at you, a so-called educated person, knowing no better than to talk like that in front of a woman in the family way. Is that what they teach you at the University, how to bring dog-faced boys and so on into the world?”

  “But people don’t believe those old wives’ tales about marked babies any more.” The feminine chorus rising beyond the closed door to some extent belied this assumption. “Those are just foolish superstitions we ought to help women be free of. We no longer believe in prenatal influence.”

  “No longer—!” My uncle stood aghast. “What have you just been telling us but that? Cleft palates, donkey ears, tails—it’s all there, you just got through saying, waiting for an unguarded word or evil influence to bring it out. It’s all there, science tells us. Aunt Wilhelmina’s got the makings of any kind of freak you care to name inside her. Name it and she’s got it, you said.”

  “That’
s not what I said. I said that everybody is a walking museum of evolution, and it’s up to you to explain the fact if Genesis is true and God created man on Saturday as a land animal. I mean what kind of God would create something to be a land biped and then stuff him with relics of a marine past and a crawling past and a quadruped past he never had? How do you explain that? I mean I’m curious.”

  My uncle wagged an unlighted cigar warningly in Louie’s face. “If I have an albino—”

  The door burst open and Doc Berkenbosch galloped into view, his coat off and rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Water,” he said, “get me some water,” and galloped back again.

  Someone snatched up a kettle and filled it at the sink while another struck a match to light the gas stove. These were of the more liberal, or enlightened, element who attended movies in face of the church’s ban on that form of entertainment. “She’s going to have it here. It’s been brought on,” one said. The kitchen table was cleared; somebody began tearing his shirt into strips for bandages.

  “No, no, a glass of water,” said the returned Doc Berkenbosch. “To take a sedative with.” He was given a tumblerful, with which he trotted back again into the parlor.

  Through the door now left open we could see my aunt in a straight chair gulping down the pill, while Doc Berkenbosch’s stethoscope rode the white billows of her bosom. The women in attendance, most of them as fat as she, formed a ring of Corybants about an Earth Mother they had husked down to the waist. Handkerchiefs soaked in strong cologne were offered her as restoratives, whiffs of which reached us in the passage where we stood craning our necks. At last Doc put his stethoscope by and announced that she would neither “have it here” nor require further concern provided rubbernecking curiosity and rival ministrations—such as the toilet waters at war with his tranquilizer—did not defeat his own. The women kept up a steady low sound neither cooing nor lamentation, but both. My mother smote her temples softly in the middle distance. A neighbor addicted to opening the Bible at random for guidance in times of stress took ours from the shelf and read aloud into the din, “Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe,” without noticeably bringing order out of chaos. Order was restored only after Doc had reassumed the guise of subway attendant and pushed everybody, men and women, into the kitchen. Here my father’s voice was heard calling us back to the fundamentals from which we had so flamboyantly strayed.

  “How about me in perdition? How about my doubts about the, och ja, whole Bible, not just Genesis? I say there is no hell. Now do you believe I’ll burn in it? Now do you understand how serious this is, and we better get busy?”

  But now my uncle had bigger fish to fry. He awaited impatiently the return of Doc Berkenbosch from the front bedroom, where Doc had gone to look in on the person he had originally come to see, my grandmother, who had been forced to lie down as a result of the to-do. When Doc walked in at last, one could tell from his face that he knew what was coming, and how much he dreaded it. He hated umpiring these arguments between Faith and Reason in a community where, God knew, it was his church connections rather than his medical skills that kept him his practice.

  “Dr. Berkenbosch,” my uncle instantly began, “you’ve been to medical school. Is there anything to what Louie here has been telling us?”

  “We-ell …”

  Smiling at the floor and pinching his nose, Doc spoke of the embryos in their jars in the old biology lab, the frog specimens floating in formaldehyde and the acids in the test tubes, all mingling their smells into one pungent essence, which he could remember still, and which was far more capable of provoking tears of nostalgia for his alma mater than glee clubs with their voices raised in song or ivy on a wall. He recalled some of his professors, the jokes they’d played on them, the fun they’d had in those days that were gone forever but that could be relived in memory yet. Then he glanced at the clock and said, “Goodness, I’ve got another call to make tonight. Maternity case too. Well, good-by, all,” and snatched up his bag and fled.

  I after him. Doc, with whom I was on friendly terms, often took me along on house calls in his old Reo, and he was certainly not averse to having a kid riding beside him tonight after all that adult commotion. Stimulated by what I had just seen and heard, however, I had no intention of giving him any peace.

  “Doc,” I said, after we had bumped along for a block or two, “is there anything to all that? That we’re all those other animals first before we get born?”

  Doc threw a harried glance over his shoulder preparatory to turning a corner. “Well, no matter what there’s in there, we’ll get it out, thanks to medical science. The strides we’ve made! Sometimes it takes a little doing, instruments and one thing and another, but we pull them through oftener than not.”

  “Gills and tails and so on. What about them?”

  Doc was encouraging about all that. He said a lot could be done for even the most difficult cases; that fetuses might be ever so incomplete and malformed, but given time, proper nourishment and prenatal care, at the end of nine months, which was all medical science asked, medical science would lay a fine, healthy child in its mother’s arms. “We call those full-term pregnancies,” he explained, “and you’d be surprised the strides we’re making in getting them. The woman I’m going to call on right now has got a youngster in a turned-around position, I don’t mind informing you, just between us,” he said as we drew to a stop before a red-brick bungalow. “We call that a breech delivery.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Tell her.”

  “Could any of these things be happening because they’re fallen women?” I asked, drawing on another of the clichés we were given like a quiverful of arrows with which to face a life cursed by sin.

  Doc sat a moment with his hand on the door handle before getting out. “Well, now, it’s interesting that you ask. I had a woman recently who fell, not just one flight of stairs, but two. She had a baby as perfect as a pool ball.”

  “How long before the birth did she fall?”

  “Ten months, maybe a year. But it didn’t interfere with her conception none, and the child that I laid in her arms, as I say, was perfect in every respect.”

  “How could she fall down two flights of stairs?”

  “Well, it was one of the miracles of medicine. She fell down one flight to the landing, turned left and rolled down another flight, clear to the ground floor, sir. She laid there in the hall till she picked herself up and walked away, and no broken bones or organic damage either. It was one of the wonders of my practice, I can tell you.”

  “Would you accept a patient with gills and a tail—proving evolution?”

  “We turn no one away. Not even,” Doc added, citing an even greater monstrosity, “when they can’t pay.”

  Sitting alone in the car while Doc made his call, I pondered all that I had heard that evening, of faith in mysteries shaken by mysteries as great if not greater; of miracles supplanted by scientific fact as conducive to reverence as the miracles. I thought I understood now the helplessness of newborn babes: they were weak, not because they were infants or tiny, but because they had just got through recapitulating a billion years of evolution. Enough to tucker anybody out!

  These mysteries more or less settled, or at least tabled, in my mind, I spent the return trip querying Doc about my father, a man given to the operatic recital of ailments no less baffling than the phenomena discussed.

  “Ben’s internal complaints are not unusual for a man with his bum insides,” Doc said. “Take his stomach. It’s not the best, but whether he’s suffering from ulsters or not we can’t say yet. But he’s certainly the ulster type, and should cut out the liquor. I’d appreciate your talking to him about that. It helps nervousness keep the stomach in an upset condition, causing the acid digestive juices to eat perforations in the wall, usually at the point where it empties into the plethora …”

  It will need no saying that Doc Berkenbosch’s endowments were of the sketchiest, to put it mildly.
While some of his terminologies could charitably be laid to embedment in a community where pronunciations were at best loosely colloquial—we all of us there said “ulsters” and “arthuritis”—some could not, but must be attributed to his abysmal training. He had gone to one of the worst medical schools in the country at a time when medical schools were a scandal. The situation was cleaned up around 1910; since then there have been no such things as unaccredited medical colleges, but there were when he got his diploma on some Southeastern campus or other and was launched into a waiting world. Strides though medical science may have made, Doc was always lengthening or shortening his own to avoid recipients of his services on the street. He had set a broken leg for another aunt of mine in a cast two inches short, so that she walked with a limp and a cane the rest of her life, which, thanks to her switching physicians, was a fairly long one. His boner—how grotesquely apt the term is!—left her undaunted and not really embittered; she took it, peasant-fashion, as part of the misfortune that had visited her in the first place. I had a bad turn some years later when I learned that my own birth had occurred unexpectedly in the house, with Doc officiating, under conditions very possibly like those adumbrated by the movie-goers who were so ready to boil water and improvise dressings from the shirts off their backs.

  The women were sitting quietly in the parlor when I got home, my aunt the center of a clucking circle, placidly turning the pages of our family album. Child after child with the requisite number of fingers and toes and bearing no noticeable taint of imbecility was loitered over, to balance and cancel out any evil released from the hint that she might be carrying a Pleistocene freak under her heart. The men were in the kitchen less composedly discussing Total Depravity, a tenet for some reason always especially dear to our folk. My uncle was explaining its connection with Original Sin, taking himself as an example to say that, while conceding he had character, integrity, a keen mind and a gift for scholarship second to none, he was unworthy in his own eyes and in the eyes of God, all his works as naught and his righteousness as filthy rags. This being our view of human merit, it can be imagined what we thought of vice. I sat huddled over folded arms and shivering again as I listened to estimates of the curse laid by the Fall on humankind, a curse thanks to which “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together”—a blight to which could be attributed all the ills that vex our mortal lot: madness and murder, lust, blasphemy, disease, rape, incest, and skies of gray. My father had evidently had his fill of provoked alarm, at least for the time being, and was content to sit and listen, albeit rather dramatically. With an effect of taking the Fall personally, he began twisting his bandanna in his horny fists and giving play to facial contortions like a man running through a series of expressions in a frantic search for the right one. My uncle reached out a hand of his own to stay the scene-stealing and its attendant eternal mugging. “Never mind that. God doesn’t want outward display. He wants us to—och ja, how shall I put it?” There was an especially long pause while the right words were groped for. “To rend our hearts and not our garments.”