Love Sleep

by John Crowley

  Days she moved from room to room, or snuck up into the woods or into the chicken house or down into town with Pierce and Bird (dangerous, daring, if they hadn’t felt themselves to be truly Invisible, and Bobby too as long as she was in their keeping, they would have betrayed themselves and her). She could stay preternaturally still and silent, make herself transparent to observation somehow, like a speckled toad in dead leaves; if you looked long at her (Pierce hiding out with her in the upstairs closet, waiting for a chance to run), there could seem something alien in the shape of her face, something opaque in her hard eyes, as though she only closely resembled a human girl.

  She still talked about getting to Deetroit and her ma, but—though they schemed with her and stole from the kitchen and the closets to provision her—they knew, Pierce and Hildy at least, that this was like make-believe, like Joe Boyd’s constant threat to run away to sea. It seemed clear that she didn’t know the way, and when once they took out the volume of maps from the cabinet where the maroon Encyclopedia was kept, and found Kentucky, she couldn’t follow what they did. There’s Clay County. There’s Pikeville. There was the No Name River too and the centipede of the railroad track. Bobby watched them without interest.

  It only slowly grew clear to them that she couldn’t read at all. “Yes I sure can,” she said defiantly, and sang out “A b c d e f g, hi jk ello mello pee,” but couldn’t pass the real tests Hildy quickly put to her. For her part she didn’t seem to believe completely that they could read what they read, and would challenge them to read passages aloud, from pages she chose, so they couldn’t cheat.

  “Ophites,” Pierce read from the Dictionary where her finger, tipped with a black-moon nail, pointed. “The Ophites were a sect who, like most Gnostics, regarded the Jehovah of the Jews with great abhorrence, and believed that the emancipation of human souls from his power was the great work of life. Thus they considered that the Serpent who tempted Eve to revolt was the benefactor of the human race. They worshipped a serpent which they kept within a sanctuary, and after it had blessed (by licking with its tongue) the Eucharist bread, the communicants each kissed it on the mouth.”

  Bobby considered this. “Don’t wonder they didn’t like Jews,” she said. “They kilt Jesus. My uncle took up a snake once in church, cause the Bible says if you believe, you can handle snakes, or drink pizen, and no harm come to you. He didn’t kiss it though.” She leafed further through the book. “Kissn snakes,” she said in disgusted disbelief, and turned the page. “Who’s this all?”

  “Statues.”

  “Where’s ther clothes?”

  “They didn’t wear them like we do.”

  She lifted her eyes slowly to Pierce, as though he had planted the picture of Hermes there for her to find. “This was long ago,” he said, blushing. “In another country.”

  “What country?” she said. “I guess Bar Nekkid Land.”

  “No, Greece.”

  “Grease, huh,” she said cynically, regarding the page.

  What she knew and they didn’t: how to light a paper match by closing the matchbook cover over the match head and the brown sandpaper strip together and then pulling the match sharply out. How to spit between her teeth, a fine straight spray like a bullet, and hit a target feet away. How to roll a cigarette with paper and loose tobacco, and smoke without choking. When Pierce bought the tobacco for her (charging it at the little store, the incurious keeper noting it on the long strip of other Oliphant charges, where it would puzzle Winnie later on amid the pop and bread and milk), they paused before the chewing tobacco displayed there: some of it tasty looking golden squares inside cellophane, another kind that was plain twists of tobacco like hanks of thick grapevine.

  “You ever chew?” she asked him.

  “No.”

  “My grandpap does. Try it,” she said, and held one of the shaggy twists to his face.

  “No!”

  “Jes try it!” she said urgently, and when he did touch his tongue to it, and recoiled from the burning bitterness, like an awful practical joke, like everything terrible he had ever tasted by mistake, she laughed with satisfaction.

  While they tried smoking the loose-rolled bundles of tobacco she made, like Saturday’s bonfire, Bobby showed him another thing she knew.

  “Lookit,” she said. She tore out two of the paper matches from the book she carried, and with her long fingernails she pried the layers of paper apart and spread them open. Now she had two little stickfigures like the ones that warred in Joe Boyd’s endless battle. Squatting by a flat rock, her sharp knees up and her dress pushed down with a fist between her knees, she laid the two figures down, one on top of the other; then, laughing low, she lit a third match in her special fashion, and with it touched the match heads of the little figures.

  “See?”

  They leapt when they ignited, and then their limbs began to writhe languorously together as the flame curled and black-ened them, legs spreading and backs arching. Bobby watched delighted, then looked at Pierce, her opaque eyes alight with devilment.

  “It’s your mawn pa,” she said. “Fuckn.”

  Then she jumped up to run, sure she had insulted him outrageously; but Pierce only looked from her to the two matchstick people, twisted as in agony, their bodies afire. Fuckn. From a distance Bobby laughed, waiting to be chased.

  Nights they talked about death, God, and revelation in the dark of the bungalow by the heater’s glow.

  “When you die,” Bobby said, “you get put down in your grave, and there you lie, dead and asleep till Jesus come. Then on that day ever’body gets out of their graves alive again, and gets judged. Then y’all go to hell, and Christians live on earth with Jesus ’bout a thousand years, and then they go on up to heaven forever. That’s all.”

  These certainties had come, she said, out of the Bible. Didn’t they read the Bible? Her grandpap read the Bible all the time, with the Holy Spert guiden him. The Holy Spert had revealed to him a secret Gospel underneath the Gospel everybody read.

  “Holy Spirit is another name for Holy Ghost,” said Hildy.

  “Not a ghost!” said Bobby, scandalized. “Ghosts are dead people come back, clankn ther chains or a big knife in ther backs. The Holy Sperta God.”

  “What about us?” Pierce said. “We’re Christians.”

  “Ain’t neither. You born again? You cept Christ?”

  “What about you?”

  “I ain’t gone die yet.”

  “What about little babies? Who die, who don’t get baptized? They didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “They go to hell too.”

  Bird drew breath at this, shocked.

  “Well to get baptized you got to cept Christ. How can a baby do that?”

  “Godparents do it,” said Bird, whose own sent her a present every year on her christening day. Bobby snorted in contempt, having no idea what a godparent might be but quick to put up a defense.

  “When babies die without getting baptized,” Hildy told Bobby, “they go to Limbo. That’s not hell. It’s outside heaven.” Hildy thought of death as being like going into a closet or a wardrobe, the earth; only the closet had an exit on the other side, the wardrobe was one such as magicians had, where after you were shut up in it you could be shown to have exited without having come back out: you exited into a geography that seemed to Hildy to be not in the sky or even in the earth but within death itself. Heaven. Hell. Purgatory. Limbo. When she thought of people there she always thought of them as on the move, in passage, migrating always farther within the endless interior of death. “Because they never got baptized, they can’t go to heaven, but it’s not their fault, so they go to Limbo, where everything is sort of nice, but they can’t be with God. Ever.”

  “But,” Pierce said, “if you’re not baptized and you grow up, and you’re like bad, you still go to hell.” An inequity in this struck him for the first time: it was like being able to lose in a game you didn’t know you were playing, but not allowed to win.

&nbs
p; “Unless,” Hildy added, raising a finger, “you have Baptism of Desire. That means you would have believed in God and gotten baptized and been a Catholic if only you had heard about it, only you didn’t, and you did your best anyway.”

  Bobby sat listening, chin in her hands, in a flannel nightgown of Bird’s, her own invincible ignorance (Pierce realized uncomfortably) slipping fast away, and with it her chance for Baptism of Desire. Nor was she an infant. Where did that leave her?

  “Anyway our mother’s in heaven now,” said Bird.

  “No she ain’t,” said Bobby. “She ain’t yet, cause Jesus ain’t come yet. Then he’ll see.”

  But there was only one of her, and three smart Oliphants (four after Warren had to be let in on the secret), and she knew which side her bread was buttered on; she listened to Hildy’s catechisms, not unpleased at the fuss made over her.

  Anyway there could be no objection, Pierce thought, to the mild dogmas they wanted to convince her of. Like Sam, the children believed that nothing which could be shown to be true could contradict faith, not evolution or the great age of the earth or Relativity; natural casuists, they were quick to notice and adopt any qualifications, ecumenicisms, loopholes in the strong fortress of faith to let in the real world, which had for them a primacy they neither perceived nor questioned. For the Oliphants—for Pierce at least—the long story read out in snatches at every Mass, never heard whole, endlessly recycled, never completed, though unquestionably true, happened somewhere elsewhere: in eternity, maybe. It was History that happened now.

  But Bobby had never heard of History; she had only the one story, her grandpap’s, about the dead and their awaking and their judgment, graphic as a horror comic, which she seemed to believe was taking place right now, this week, this winter. She had no ritual obligations, she didn’t even go to church on Sunday, no church having the true story the Holy Spert had taught her grandpap; and she knew no prayers at all.

  Under the bungalow with Hildy and Bird, close around Bobby, showing her how to pray: hands pressed palm to palm, thumbs optionally crossed or side by side. Hail Mary Mother of God. At Jesus’s name Hildy tipped Bobby’s head down with a finger and then released it. The fruit of thy womb. Which had what to do, exactly, with the name of the underpants Pierce wore, it must be something, chance alone couldn’t account for such a similarity. From above their heads (they were right below the schoolroom) they heard the sharp strike of Sister’s desk bell. They dared ignore it once.

  “If you’re Catholic you aren’t prejudiced,” Hildy said, “and you don’t have to think Negroes are worse than other people. It’s a sin to have prejudice.” Colored people are no different at all from us, Opal Boyd had told them all, and Hildy believed it, though she’d known none; neither had Opal.

  “Sun don’t set on ther heads in Clay County,” Bobby said mildly. “My ma said they better not let it.”

  She had begun to shiver. Sister’s bell rang again. They could see it in their minds, silver, but shaped exactly like a chocolate marshmallow cookie, why. “Don’t leave,” Hildy said. She pressed Bobby back against the cold dry clay.

  Clay County. Sam said mountain kids were sometimes given to eating clay.

  In Brooklyn when he was in the second grade Pierce had dreamt, not once but several times exactly the same, that he was to be crucified alongside Mary’s Son, share in His sacrifice; it was to happen on the auditorium stage of St. Simon Cyrenean’s, three crucifixes set up there amid the dusty velvets before rows of kids in the fanny-polished wooden seats (Pierce himself somehow among them as well as being crucified or about to be crucified); he felt no fear or reluctance, only the grave weight of responsibility, privilege too, the same priggish satisfaction that he felt at the work of Bobby’s conversion. When he recalled it—for the first time since that winter—it caused him an involuntary groan of embarrassment. How could he have.

  She was gone when they looked for her again under the bungalow. The empty crawlspace smelled of her and of the food they had brought for her there. A small cold rain had begun to fall.

  She wasn’t in the chicken house either, or in the garage out by where the trash was burned. The rain came and ceased like sniffles; Mousie called them for supper from the kitchen. Wieners and beans, sweetened with dark Karo. They ate in silence, feeling cold darkness assemble itself around them and the house.

  She was in Bird’s bed, rolled in the bedspread (she hadn’t seemed to understand the differences, bedspread, blanket, sheet) and asleep; when Hildy touched her she writhed as though bitten, and sat up to stare at them. Her hair was wet on her forehead. When they asked where she had been, she answered in thick gobs of language they couldn’t understand and crawled again into the pillow. Then she flung the spread aside and stood, her mouth open and her breath coming harsh and quick.

  “Are you sick?” Hildy put her hand on Bobby’s damp forehead, but Bobby shook her off and tottered toward the bathroom (the others following) and to the sink. Wet panties lay on the floor; the toilet unflushed. Bobby opened the tap, her hands shaking, and put her mouth to it to drink.

  Smacking and swallowing, she pushed unseeing through them and to the bed again, and was asleep again immediately, or at least still, face turned down, labored breathing loud. The others stood by the bed, smelling the sour odor of her sickness.

  “What if she dies?” Hildy said.

  EIGHT

  All night she tossed and talked, and once again got out of bed and back in again; her frightful breathing, deep and fast like a dog’s panting, only slowed a little toward morning. She was quiet when Pierce’s alarm woke him to get to Mass.

  Mousie was supposed to be up too, to pour his Cheerios and make sure his hair was brushed, but on the first morning of his weeklong early-Mass duty he had gone into the still-dark kitchen and stood waiting, listening to the upstairs alarm ring, fade and die, and silence follow it. Mousie couldn’t get up fast enough, apparently, and so Pierce (unwilling to disturb her and the house’s sleep by making his own breakfast) just went on, stopping at the little store, already lit, to buy orange crackers filled with gray peanut butter.

  On this morning he didn’t stop even there, only hurried on through the sad-breaking morning, his stomach and ribcage trembling; so he was fasting, as he wasn’t usually, and when Father Midnight turned to him inquiringly after ingesting his own huge Host, he could put the paten under his own chin (he and Father Midnight being the only two present at the sacrifice, two being enough, one alone being enough for that matter). With the invariable few unintelligible words Father Midnight placed the circle on his tongue. Pierce closed his eyes, left hand pressed against his bosom and right hand still holding the paten that caught falling crumbs of God (every minute fragment, every molecule being wholly God) as the almost nonexistent sweetish circle dissolved against his palate: waiting for certainty, or at least resolve, to flow into him from its dissolution.

  After Mass in the vestibule the priest removed his layers of embroidered satin and white lace one after the other, his lips moving almost indetectably in silent prayer, and kissed the stole that contained his power (Mass could be said without the rest of it, but not that) before hanging it. Pierce too hung up his white surplice and black cassock among the others, his heart beating fast and still warm from the Host he had swallowed.

  “Son.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Do you know that when you move the book from Gospel to Epistle side, it’s appropriate to kiss the page?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Have we discussed this?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Do you have an objection to osculation?” This said in Sam’s tone, as though for the amusement of some knowing hearer not actually present. Osculation: he guessed the meaning. He had no objection; it had only seemed to him weirdly forward, extravagant, like kissing elderly relatives.

  “Well then,” Father Midnight said.

  Pierce pulled his jacket on.

  “Thank you, son
.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  Back out through the empty church, hands in his jacket pockets, not forgetting a quick bend-of-knee when passing the inhabited altar: and to the font of pale stone by the door, filled with cold and faintly slimy water. Feeling along his back a horrid certainty that he would be caught, that he was being looked at even now by Father Midnight at least, he took from his pocket the aluminum cylinder (it was waterproof, meant to keep matches in on camping trips, though no matches had ever been put in it) and dipped it in the font. Brief endless moment while it gurgled full. Out then, capping the vial, into the day, which had grown up, while he was inside, into gray fullness.

  Maybe the Communion he had taken hadn’t been such a good idea after all. The warmth in his heart had overspread his chest and seemed no longer warm but caustic, angry, affronted maybe at his impertinence. His throat had filled with sour matter, and his head was light.

  Hildy, white-faced and wide-eyed, looked out the window of the bungalow’s door and then opened it a crack to admit him. “She threw up,” she whispered to him in awe. “Not real throwup, but this goo.”

  Bird sat by Bobby in her bed, holding Bobby’s hand in hers and staring at her fixedly. Bobby’s face seemed coated faintly in shining slime, and she stared at Pierce unseeing with eyes clouded and pale, as though cooked, like eggs. As soon as he saw her, as soon as he breathed in the sickroom odor, Pierce knew two things: that it was all up, Mousie would have to be told; and that he was sick himself. And ever after, when the onset of fever would assemble within him all the other days of fever he had ever experienced (as though fever were a different life he only sometimes lived, with its own memories as well as its own thirsts and needs and weaknesses), this morning would be one of them.

  “She’s got to get better she’s got to she’s got to,” Hildy whined softly, out of her depth and afraid.

  “Okay,” Pierce said. “Okay.” He took out the vial of water from his pocket and put it on the rickety table beside Bird’s bed, decals of bear and bunny, where wadded tissues and half-filled glasses of water were crowded.