by John Crowley
It was she also who convinced Pierce (and Winnie and Sam too) that Pierce was fit to take up liturgical duties himself; she touched his vanity and his taste for the hieratic as well as his good nature and willingness to assent, and she brought him to Father Midnight to be instructed. Now (she said) it would be easy for him to make a daily Communion; now he could begin accumulating the special benefits that accrue to those who volunteer in God’s service. Joe Boyd snorted, amazed that Pierce would volunteer for duties he could have wriggled out of, but Pierce didn’t mind; he learned his lines by rote, he took his place beyond the altar rail with Father Midnight. And long after, when the words he had committed to memory were no longer said anywhere, not anyway in the dead language Pierce had learned them in, they would now and then return spontaneously to him like the jingles of old ads, heard by an inner ear in the mnemonic rhythms he had bent them into, their absurd dago-American pronunciation. Soosheepiat Dominus sacrafeechium d’manibus tooies. Touching him with an inexplicable poignancy in the street or on the stair.
In some ways dealing with Sister Mary Philomel was like dealing with a smart and powerful child, a Warren able to make a grownup’s case for his fear of the dark or his theory that badguys came into his room at night while he was asleep and messed up his things. If Sister Mary Philomel opened a closet door in search of her umbrella and found it not there, and then not much later (after asking God’s help in finding it) she opened the same closet again and there it was, her first thought was not that she had overlooked it the first time. Saints and angels, when compelled by the proper invocations, interceded on the petitioner’s behalf with the remoter divine figures, who then altered the weather or the natural order, sped mailmen on their way, and of course healed the sick and saved the lost or the endangered.
The Oliphant children weren’t equipped to argue with claims which Sister Mary Philomel had after all a large authority to make. She told them Jesus had promised: if you asked it would be given to you, period. If you asked for bread, God wouldn’t give you a stone.
“But if you ask for a real gun or a hundred pounds of candy you won’t get it,” Hildy warned Warren and the others after school. “God won’t give you what’s not good for you. Just try it.”
Which cut out almost everything you might want to apply for, especially since the decision about whether the item was or wasn’t good for you wasn’t yours to make: it never was. And yet His promises remained; Sister Mary Philomel took as given that they were to be acted on, and when she prayed for His aid with the intercession of His Saints it wasn’t in the self-mocking way that Winnie sang out:
Dear St. Anthony
Please find my keys for me
Or I won’t get to the grocer-ee.
So they all wore their itchy and unmanageable phylacteries and their tin medals on ten-cent beaded chains (Where did she get this stuff, Pierce later wondered, did she spend her own pin money on it or did it just come naturally out of her concealed and bottomless pockets?), and for a week Pierce worked on believing that a dim ectoplasmic glow somehow generated in the corner of his room was a vision of the Virgin, or maybe the Holy Ghost, come to answer his prayer that Joe Boyd quit trying to pick fights with him; and Hildy learned to ask her Guardian Angel to wake her up in the morning so that she would have time to bathe and dress more carefully than she was accustomed to, and in a way more pleasing to Sister: and it worked. Sam thought that was funny too.
It wasn’t unlike the commitments of make-believe: it required the same division into a proposing and an accepting self, the same quick discarding of unrewarding instances, the same communal intensity of effort. It was like wishing, too, the objects more restricted, but requiring the same surrender to desire, the willingness to accept provisionally (for as long anyway as the wish, or the prayer, filled up the heart) the primacy of desire over common reality. Sister Mary Philomel called it Faith.
From the beginning she felt a special responsibility had been placed on her for these smart wild children. Miss Martha had come at nine and left at noon, having handed out assignments she might or might not remember to ask for next day. Sister Mary Philomel left at noon, a dark frigate under sail, walking down the hill toward the hospital and her lunch; and then at two, to the children’s horror, she sailed back again, her arms full of papers and projects, to pester her charges for an indeterminate length of the afternoon. She had no real commission for this; she said she was there only to “tidy up” in the schoolroom and prepare for the next day (prepare what?), but the very ambiguity of her afternoon presence within the compound gave her scope Miss Martha would not have dared take. There were plenty of things active children could be set to doing instead of watching Garry Moore on television.
What Sister Mary Philomel couldn’t know was that her fuss-budgeting disrupted more than idleness. The Invisible College had business, Pierce had far-ranging researches to complete. He experienced an anxiety almost unendurable to know that the nun was nearby, even if not actively interfering; anxiety that she would put her black-shod foot through the thin fabric he and the others had woven. His faith was not as strong as hers.
When he came later on in life to study history, unavoidably learning something of the history of the Church in which he had been raised, Pierce would experience a definite but unnameable thrill when (usually by chance) he would happen upon one of his own old beliefs just coming into being, some practice or complication of ritual which he had used to assume was somehow pre-existent, eternal, given: Ember Days and Rogation Days, feasts and fasts and the reasons for them, the divisions of the next world and its inhabitants. The cult of the Sacred Heart (gruesome Jesus with effulgent exposed organ wrapped in thorns) swept the Church in the early nineteenth century; the choirs of the angels (Thrones Powers Virtues Dominations and the rest) came into being in the late second. It was a pleasure like and unlike the pleasure of opening an old school reader (Roads and Highways) and finding it full of tales of dirigibles and Pullman cars, organ-grinders and circus-wagons, Arbor Day and Armistice Day: what he had then taken for the whole great world shown to be only a transverse section, worldwide maybe but decade-thin, and passed away, now, along with those who had issued it.
“What would you think, children,” asked Sister Mary Philomel, “if a rich man at dinner heard of a beggar at his door, who had nothing, and sent out to the beggar some food? That would be good of him, wouldn’t it? And what if this rich man sent the poor beggar his own dinner? Wouldn’t you think he was a good man? And children what if the man sent the beggar his own arm to eat? That would be wonderful charity, wouldn’t it? Well Jesus gives us not only His arm or just a part of Him for us to eat but His whole Body. Now think of that.” And they did think of it, only a little horror-struck, unaware that (as Pierce would read years later, and hoot with amazement and triumph to read) Sister Mary Philomel had retailed a common trope of Baroque piety, dating from the years when embattled Catholics were pulling out all the stops on transubstantiation, the years when Sister Mary Philomel’s own order was being founded.
For all that she lived in a world malleable by belief and desire, still Sister paid close attention to mundane reasons, and the daily management of life; Pierce would think of her when his great teacher at college, the historian Frank Walker Barr, pointed out how even if the primitive hunter believes his prayers and his magic are what guide his spear to his prey, still he knows he has to sharpen the spear, and learn to aim and throw it.
“Will God help us if we ask Him?”
“Yesster.”
“Will God help us if we do nothing for ourselves?”
“Nosster.”
“God helps those who help themselves.”
“Yesster.”
It was easy enough for Sister to assume her unchallengeable ascendancy over the younger children. Pierce at yellow-brick St. Simon Cyrenean in Brooklyn (separate doors for Boys and Girls) and the Oliphants in a new long low concrete-block and plate-glass St. Longinus on Long Island had learned unbreakabl
e habits of deference. They could make no objection, wronged as they felt themselves to be, when Sister Mary Philomel organized them into after-school work details, to clean the fishbowl her fat carp swam in, to cut out turkeys and shamrocks and lilies green and white to festoon her walls at the proper seasons, not even when she took it on herself to have them mop their bedroom floors and remake their beds, like prison trusties.
But Joe Boyd was a harder case. It was apparent he was too old for the miniature classroom and its cutouts and flashcards. As much as she could Sister Mary Philomel set Joe Boyd problems and readings to be done by himself in the cold but at least private windowed room beyond the kitchen. Though she was cautious with Joe Boyd, she wasn’t afraid of him; she chose carefully the instances when she would try conclusions with him, and almost always she won, gracious if unbending in victory and including him in that teacher’s “we” that cut him too deep for words: Are we ready to start on our assignment now?
He was one of those spirits Pierce would always marvel at, supposing them to be rare: those who grant no absolute authority to anyone, who assume that all proscriptions are ad hoc and negotiable and that those in power are just people, more or less like themselves. Pierce might do all he could to avoid being subject to the power of others, of rule-makers and -enforcers, but he neither thought to question their right to enforce their own rules, nor supposed their rules were bendable. Joe Boyd always did.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said to Bird, who was busy mulching and tidying a bare spot that Sister Mary Philomel had decided would be a flower garden in the spring. “Just because she says so.”
“I don’t mind.”
“This isn’t her place,” Joe Boyd said. “This isn’t her property.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Are you going to do everything she says? Would you jump in the river if she said?”
“That’s dumb.”
“You’re dumb.”
Their father, about to sit on the toilet of the bathroom beneath whose window the garden was being laid out, overheard this, and came out.
“Joe. Why are you pestering her?”
“I’m not.” He thrust his hands in his pockets defensively as Sam approached him.
“Huh? She’s doing something useful and beautiful, and you’re doing nothing. Why are you taunting her?”
“I wasn’t.”
“You can just leave her alone. Go find something to do yourself. I can think of several things if you don’t have any ideas.”
He turned to go, putting his magazine under his arm; Joe Boyd went off, but as he did so he tossed a final sneer at Bird for her submission: Teacher’s pet.
Sam heard him, and rounded on him.
Sam never hit his children, and almost never raised his voice to them: he had never needed to. Bird watched now in horror as he seized Joe Boyd by the collar with both hands and thrust him hard against the wall.
“Did you hear what I just said?” His nose inches from Joe Boyd’s face. “Did you hear me tell you to leave her alone? Why did you just turn right around and insult her? Huh?”
There was no answer, and Joe Boyd knew better than to make one: and yet even looking into Sam’s furious face his gray eyes were unflinching, unafraid, alert to possibility. Bird, scandalized, dismayed to have been the occasion for this outrage, wouldn’t forget his courage or his cool.
Pierce that afternoon was hiding in the attic with a book.
FIVE
WEREWOLF: Men (more rarely women) who occasionally have the form of wolves are Werewolves. The greatest question concerning Werewolves, and one debated since the Middle Ages by learned writers and doctors, is whether Werewolves can actually change their forms, or only think they have changed them; whether, as a result of their nature or through the power of the DEVIL (q.v.), they are actually capable of transformation, or rather suffer from a delusion (Lycanthropy) in which they believe themselves to be so transformed, though they remain human. The psychological explanation came to predominate, though it explains far fewer recorded instances than the physiological.
Across one end of the cool dusty-gray attic Pierce had run a rope, and on the rope had hung four old drapes he had found there, flowered with maroon roses; behind them, lit by the pointed attic window, was the clubhouse of the Invisible College—not of the physical chapter, but of the other, the one that consisted of Pierce alone. Sometimes the adventures that the College undertook up here were told of in the regular nighttime meetings: sometimes not.
Augustine thought that what is transformed is the phantasticum, a sort of spectral double that goes out in a form able to be seen, while the sleeping person dreams its experiences. More than one Werewolf, however, has claimed that his wolf’s pelt is a real part of him, only turned inward like a hairshirt (versipilis). One Werewolf who claimed that his hair was inside was so badly cut by the surgeons trying his claim that he died. That was not, seemingly, the “inside” of which he spoke.
Pierce shuddered, but not from cold. He put his finger on the page, and looked up, hearing voices calling to him from below: Joe Boyd, Warren. They would wait.
Werewolves were known to antiquity, of course, and appear both in literature and medical texts, where the condition is described as Morbus lupinus and is always understood as a delusion, as it would not later be. There are Werewolves all through the Dark Ages as well, but there is a sudden and distinct increase in reported sightings and depredations of Werewolves in the later 16th C. and the early 17th. In Burgundy, in Hungary, in Bohemia, in Moldavia, men and women are charged with being Werewolves, the deaths of domestic animals and children are blamed on them. Great wolf-hunts are licensed and organized; Werewolves are captured and sentenced to horrifying deaths. These are also the years in which WITCHES (q.v.) also are discovered everywhere, tried, tortured and burned in vast numbers. Bodin the encyclopædist believed the plague of witches was due to the operations of the overreaching magicians of his day, who irresponsibly let loose crowds of dæmons that then seized upon and possessed the unwary.
Suddenly struck with the presence of that double letter, “æ”, which he saw often in this book and in the pages of his missal, and nowhere else. Was a dæmon a demon? What was the difference? Where was Ægypt?
We typically think of Werewolves as creatures of evil, despoilers of the herds and of the herders too, who are able to take on animal form as witches took on the forms of cats or mice. But there is evidence that the Werewolves may not, or may not always, have thought of themselves in that way. There took place in Jurgens burg in 1692 the trial of a certain Thiess, a man in his eighties, who confessed to being a Werewolf, and astonished his judges by claiming that his kind, so far from being witches, were the natural enemies of witches. The witches, he told them, are the despoilers; they seize the new-planted seed-grains and seedlings from the earth, they steal the ripening harvest, and carry them off to Hell. In the Ember Days of the year, the Werewolves gather at night to pursue and do battle with them, to rescue the grain, and the livestock too and other fruits of the earth which the witches have stolen, and return them safely to the fields. If they fail, if they delay their pursuit, they find the gates of Hell locked against them; and the harvest that year will fail, fish in the sea hide themselves away, the young stock die. Nor were the Livonian Werewolves singular: the Russian and the German Werewolves fought witches in the same way. Thiess was punished for witchcraft despite his story of the enmity of witches and Werewolves, a secret history within the history of witchcraft.
What if it were true. It could not be: but what if it were. Strange but true.
A sudden partisanship arose within Pierce’s heart, a longing so deep and simple that he could not even be puzzled by it: a longing indistinguishable from grief, that the story ought to be true, and could not be.
He thought of their sufferings: To be one thing on the outside, another on the inside; to seem nothing and no one, to be despised and ignored, unseen, and yet to be somebody on whom the welfa
re of everybody depends, even though they don’t know it.
Pierce thought, in those days, that his attraction to the wrong sides, to the losing armies in historical struggles, was a motion of his spirit to take the part of the underdog, a kind of noble motion, like Joe Boyd’s attraction to the dove-gray Confederacy: but it wasn’t. Often enough the losers he was drawn to weren’t the underdogs at all (Pierce leaned to the Tory side of the American Revolution as well as to the South, though he knew as well as Joe Boyd did who had been right in both those quarrels and who wrong). It wasn’t taking the underdog’s side: it was simply a sneaking desire to reverse the sides, to experience the story as though it had a secret inner logic the opposite of its usual one, the goodguys now the others, bearing the other flag: it couldn’t be true, but what if it was.
The game gave him an inexplicable satisfaction, the same he felt when he lay on his back in bed hanging his head downward over the bed’s edge, and by an act of will convinced his eyes that the floor was a dark dusty ceiling over his head, and the ceiling a white floor, with lamps sprouting upward from it: and a house different but the same, empty of furniture, extending outward room upon room over the tall thresholds of the open doors.