by John Crowley
But Val had closed the book before she reached these parts, sure she had bored herself enough to sleep; the big book lay closed at the bottom of her bed (she never minded sleeping with Our Friends from Bookland as she called them) and the light was off; yet she lay still with eyes open, hands behind her head, watching the faint bloom of the window.
Who is Una Knox?
A joke, Rosie had said: My old girlfriend Una Knox. But who is she? And what is she to him?
TEN
But now the mystic night has passed; the cock has crowed, the goat’s abroad. Black things of night, the bat, the bug, have flown away; the flowers have opened their cups to catch the sun.
There’s to be a picnic. Rosie is up early and has Sam dressed and ready to be given over to her father, Mike Mucho. She and Sam sit together on the front steps at Arcady, just throne height to Sam, waiting for Mike’s car to turn in at the gate.
“Do you have Brownie?” Rosie wants to know (Sam won’t sleep if she has forgotten Brownie, her rag doll). “Do you have blankie? Do you have a hankie?”—until Sam laughs aloud. Yes she does. The only way Rosie can mitigate her shame and anxiety when Sam goes away with her father is to check the list over and over. She regards Sam’s fat toes, peeking out beneath the straps of her sandals, and is caught by a blow of love and guilt. “Here’s Daddy.”
The transfer is made swiftly and without the subtle rancor that used to accompany it in the wintertime, when the separation was newer and claims were felt more sharply; and also Mike has for some reason grown nice, just in the last month, making Rosie suspicious, though she gets nothing clarifying from him when she asks why.
“Why being nice? I’m usually not?” A wide smile for Rosie’s reserved one. “If there was a reason,” Mike says, “would you want to hear?”
“Well.”
“Uh huh,” Mike says, understanding (understanding is, or ought to be, his game, he being employed at a psychotherapeutic institution up on Mount Whirligig). “Well.” Sam riding his hip kicks him idly. “If you want to know.”
“I’ll ask,” Rosie says. “I will. Really. Not now.”
And they are gone away, with enough waves and goodbyes and kisses for a long journey; and Rosie sits again on the low wide warping steps in the odorous morning, chin in her hands, waiting for her lover’s rattletrap truck to turn in next at the gate. A white transparent moon is going down the blue sky over the westward mountains.
First he had to check in with his sheep, as he put it: for the little flock that grazed beneath the oaks of Arcady belonged to Rosie’s friend and lover Spofford, who had set them to summer here, not really having pasture for them on his own couple of mountainside acres.
“So how do they look to you? Good?” Rosie asked him.
“They’re good,” Spofford said, and pushed open the door for Rosie to get in. “They’re unchanged. Except for being that much woollier. They seem to be running sort of wild here, which is what I expected.”
“Wild and woolly.” It was Rosie’s dogs who actually policed the sheep under Spofford’s and Rosie’s supervision, two Australian sheepdogs she had acquired on an impulse she could not make sense of; later, Spofford made sense of it for her, deciding on his own that Boney’s grounds needed sheep to keep down the grass and that the sheep needed Rosie’s dogs to keep them down in turn. Rosie thought it likely that Spofford could make sense, even profit, out of any dumb impulse she had, if she were to permit him; which is why she kept him, usually, at a long arm’s length.
“Lambs getting fat,” Spofford said, and touched his own belly. He was a lean big man, dark-bearded and summer-brown.
“Well the ugly one sure should be,” Rosie countered, slamming the truck door. “He ate all my lettuces, your cute little fence notwithstanding.”
“Ugly?” Spofford said, looking at her in mock wonderment. “Ugly?”
They had all clustered by now at the gate, behind the single strand of electrified fencing, to baa in supplication at their shepherd, grain-bringer, hoof-mender, who drove past them making calculations in his head.
“Nine lambs,” he said. “I’ve got orders for six, and Val’s two is eight …”
“Val is going to cook lamb?” Rosie marveled. The Faraway Lodge was known for its chicken-back cacciatore dinner, Mama’s sole specialty.
“So she says.”
“You talked her into that.”
“The question is,” he said, “are you guys going to take the other one?”
“Don’t tell Sam.”
“Kids,” he said, “care less than you think. They don’t mind eating their friends at that age. Later maybe. Now—eat, be eaten, live, die, it’s all part of the fun.”
She looked over at him, thinking he was probably not wrong, and wondering how he came to know that.
Not till long after they had gone did the sheep cease their calling and wander away again, coming one by two before Boney’s eyes, who was sitting up in the chaise longue in the library, made up as a bed. He had moved into this room on coming home, his wheelchair, his medicines, his slippers and robe; just until he got strong enough, said Mrs. Pisky (his housekeeper, now his nurse), to go back upstairs like before. He looked out hungrily at the day, the satisfied sheep, the happy or at least uncomplaining trees, the morning slipping unceasingly away.
The moon can’t be seen from the morning streets of Blackbury Jambs, for it is occluded by the big bulk of the mountains, whose heads were burning now, set afire by the climbing sun. On Maple Street where Pierce Moffett lived the robin and the wren had been long awake and were still clamorous, though the traffic of the town and a brass band somewhere nearby practicing were louder by now. Pierce, oddly cheerful considering, stood with Beau in the driveway of Beau’s house, resting against the trunk of Beau’s car; they were waiting for the rest of the household, those of the household who were coming on this outing, to gather themselves. (Several women always lived in the house, always a couple of them with children, maybe not always their own; Pierce sensed they had been hurt in one way or another by the world, and been taken in here; the place was a day-care center too, and a crafts factory, and tidy as a convent.)
“Like this,” Beau said to Pierce. He drew a small circle in the dirt of the driveway with a twig of maple. “God,” he said.
“Uh huh,” said Pierce, arms crossed before him.
Beau ringed his first circle with another. “The soul,” he said.
“Uh huh.”
Another circle. “The spirit.” And another. “The body.” Beau looked down amused at his own drawing, or perhaps amusement was only suggested by the natural curve of his lips and the delicate attention of his dark eyes; Pierce often wondered. “Now I can’t fit them in,” Beau said, “but there should be nine circles, spheres really, between the spirit and the outside of the body …”
“And nine,” Pierce said, for he was getting this now, “from the skin outward.”
“More, actually,” said Beau. “But let’s just say—the world,” and he circled his circles again. “Then last of all”—he drew again, a big sweeping circle that intersected the driveway’s edge, the car’s rear end, and a picnic basket resting by the car—“God, outside it all, outermost.”
Pierce pondered. Back when he was a teacher of Western Civilization, he used to draw just such a set of nesting circles for his students, to illustrate how Dante imagined hell, the world, and the heavens. But it’s not true, he would tell them then, shake them up, get their attention. It’s really really not true.
“So when the soul gets under way,” he said now to Beau, looking up outward into the empty blue air, “then which way, which way …”
“It’s not a map,” Beau said, finishing the scratching of his circle. “It’s not a picture. It’s a plan. It’s … did you ever study drafting?”
“A plot,” said Pierce, and laughed aloud.
The picnic was to take place high up on the slopes of Mount Merrow, in a spot Beau remembered but would have to find ag
ain by sense of smell; it would require some climbing, anyway, which was why they were setting off so early. Even as the women and children of Beau’s household were getting into the rust-speckled Python sedan, Rosie Rasmussen and Spofford were turning off the Shadow River road in Spofford’s truck, and down a twisting way to the riverside and the Faraway Lodge where Val was waiting for them, uncharacteristically ready. Not even curtains and earplugs had returned her to sleep, and she had got up at length and deviled eggs noisily till Mama woke up and tut-tutted into the kitchen to ask for tea.
The pasture they all came to at length was high, and sloped gently down to a stone wall crossing through blueberry bushes and alders shaking the silver coins in their fingers, and there was a great beech that somehow alone had found room to root there and “spread its canopy” as Pierce insisted on saying: but Beau couldn’t remember if this really was the same one as last year. They put out the plaid blanket there and laid down the baby (one of the women of Beau’s household was her mother) and the lunch, and gossiped till the sun was high.
“Things are strange this year,” Val said. “Stranger even than the usual summer strangeness. Do you notice like people huddled in twos and threes in like the Donut Hole or Caspar’s and you get close and what they’re talking about is God? You notice that? Is this new?”
“The aura balancers are in town,” the child’s mother put in, releasing one breast discreetly for it to have. “If I had the money.”
“There was a character in the bar, I think he’s at The Woods, I think a therapist,” Val went on.
“Some people have been really helped.”
“He starts in with God. I need this, with Mama always ready to talk about her personal experiences? And I had to say to him: What I don’t understand is all the pain.”
“The what?” Beau said.
“Why, if God is there and can do anything, why is there unbearable constant pain. Just pick up a newspaper.”
“I don’t think,” Pierce put in, “that you’re the first person in the history of monotheism to be puzzled by this.”
“This?” Val said, looking around, as though for the thing Pierce had noticed. “This?”
“The problem of evil,” Pierce said, crossing his arms behind his head. “If there is a God, and God is both omnipotent and good, how can he permit suffering, even if he doesn’t actively cause it?”
“Well?” Val said. “Is this an easy question? Smartypants?”
“Heck no.” He looked up, to contemplate the phalanx of round clouds moving overhead like a starship invasion.
“Maybe,” Beau said, “the God you’re talking about isn’t good.”
“Or maybe he isn’t omnipotent,” Val said. “Does his best, but.”
“Or maybe,” Pierce said, “he doesn’t know we suffer. Since he’s beyond the possibility of suffering himself, maybe he doesn’t understand that certain experiences we have are painful.”
“Then he’s maybe omnipotent, but he’s not, what’s the other thing, all-knowing.”
“Omniscient.”
“Omniscient,” said Val. “Because if he was, he’d know we suffered. Right?”
“Maybe he’s even more omniscient than that,” Beau said. “Maybe there is really no suffering ever, and we just delude ourselves into thinking there is; since we’re made free, we’re free to make that mistake; all God can do is pity us, and help try to disabuse us.”
“Disabuse,” said Val in a tone of foreboding.
“That’s the Christian Science answer,” Pierce said.
“It’s the Christian answer,” Beau said. “Only most Christians don’t know it.”
Val laughed. “Let us pray,” she said. “Good bread, good meat, good God let’s eat.”
On the lichened rocks amid the birches up above the meadow, screened from the others, Rosie wept in the dappled shade.
“It’s like this cold, hard stone,” she said to Spofford, who sat on the ground below her; “a lump always there, always,” and she struck her breast with her fist, once, twice, three times, in the same gesture Pierce had used to make at every confession. “Always,” she said. “I get so goddamn tired of it.”
Spofford plucked at the ground pine between his boots. “I never had it there.”
“It’s as though it’s all I’ve got sometimes.”
“I had it in the gut,” Spofford said. “Something the same I bet. I thought for a long time I had cancer, because I could feel this cold lump of something growing bigger, and I got weaker. Never did anything about it, just waited for it to get big enough to kill me.”
“What was it?”
“Nothing.” He looked up at her. “Did I ever tell you about Cliff?”
“No. Yes. A little.” She hadn’t ever quite believed in Cliff, a vet friend of Spofford’s who lived somewhere in the woods around here, whom Spofford sometimes quoted, or credited with wisdom she thought was probably Spofford’s own. “Well tell me,” she said now, impatient, as though he were dumbly withholding what he thought she needed, even if she didn’t want it.
“I was going to say you might want to talk to him.” He smiled again. “I mean he cured my cancer.”
“Christ I don’t know.” She looked off to where the others still sat or lay around the blanket. “What do you think.”
“He charges.”
“He does?”
“Well sure. This is what he does, helps.”
She laughed, tasting her bitter tears. “You’re going to take me to some kind of homegrown guru who charges to fix you up?”
Spofford lowered his eyes to the grasses he plucked. “It’s only because I don’t know what else,” he said.
She shook her head, done crying for the moment. “So like what did he do? To you.”
“Well he works with you. Helps you to feel. Body work. It’s hard to describe.” He laughed at a memory. “One thing, he told me to make a list of all the things I really wanted, in every category. Like Work and Money and Love. Sex. Achievements. Anything.”
“What if you don’t want anything?”
“I didn’t.”
“So?”
“So I started a list anyway. I put down the categories. What: Money. Sex. Yes all right I would like to have sex again sometime, with somebody besides Missus Palm and her five daughters.” Rosie laughed, where on earth did he get them, the chestnuts he handed her. “Okay? I wrote down: Miscellaneous. I wrote under that: Someday I want to want things.”
Rosie covered her eyes, squeezed them shut; her heart was too stony even to weep, it seemed, her very tears were dry and burned her eyes and nose like sand or salt.
“You start by wanting,” Spofford said quietly. “Even if what you want is for life to be different from what it is, the whole basic world to be different; even if you want your own”—he struck his breast, just as Rosie had done—“to be different.”
“Ah,” she said, in pain. “Ah.”
“You can have it all. That’s what Cliff said. Start by wanting.”
“Like three wishes come true? Sure.”
“Wanting is life, Rosie. Dreams are life. What Cliff said is: Life is dreams checked by physics.”
Rosie laughed aloud, relieved by this idea somehow, which made an instant sense to her. Life is dreams checked by physics. “Then you sure can’t have it all,” she said.
“Well you’d have to see,” he said, getting up, grinning at her since she was at least no longer crying. He pulled a loose scroll of paper from a birch, and a pencil from his pocket. “Because look at this, how Cliff used to picture life, or the world. Look.” He spread the birchbark on the rock beside Rosie, and with the bit of blunt carpenter’s pencil drew a small circle. “God,” he said. “This is what Cliff said.” He drew another larger circle around that. “You,” he said. Another: “The world. And last”—he drew a final circle—“God again.” He raised his eyes to her. “So see? Maybe you can do more than you think.”
She looked down at him in wonder. “You be
lieve in God?” she asked.
“I’ve always thought I could sort of imagine God, a little,” Pierce said. He sipped beer. “My problem is imagining that God could imagine me.”
Beau had already departed from the colloquy, too primitive for him probably, and Val was losing interest. “You’ll have to write that down,” she said, and yawned.
Pierce could postulate a God unaware of human suffering, a God somewhere out beyond the inconceivable frontiers of actuality, hidden for good in the paradoxes of untime and notspace; what he could not do was suppose that anything infinite—anything so large as to encompass the in-itself-just-about-infinite or as-good-as-infinite physical universe—could form any conception of something so small as himself.
There were other constructions of God that avoided this difficulty, an immanent God, a syntactical God, an aggregate God arising out of the web of human cognition, like the Skull suddenly apprehended instead of the Lady and the Mirror in the old Victorian trick-picture. But the God Beau talked about was not some artifact like that, it was a person. What person?
If you really felt the need for one, it seemed to Pierce that there were persons other than the usual one (beard, big robe, aged eye of power) that would be more congenial, more convincing too, at least to Pierce. As long as God had demonstrably no parts at all, why not assign him a different set, more consonant with his actual behavior? If you imagined God not as an old man but as say a nine-year-old girl.