Tex went to the office to give the alarm, to shift responsibility and to gladly tell the news. John looked down at Urban, the face as simple as a child’s drawing of a face—two eyes, two nostrils and a mouth. Or a mask from the Solomons, a white devil god, implacable and malevolent. A worn effigy in white marble on the lid of a sarcophagus. He had seen dead men, women and children, some bloated into caricatures, faces painted on balloons. They had all by their extreme silence been full of power.
Oval arrived when everyone had gathered around. When he saw what they were looking at, and understood, he knelt beside Urban and put his long hand on the cold forehead, pressing and measuring the shape of it. With his other hand he cupped Urban’s jaw. It must have been like handling ice. Oval, his own clean jaws inert, removed his hands and stared at the moisture on his palms.
The police came this time. One, in civilian clothes, said after examining Urban that he might, by the cant of his head, have a broken neck. The police went inside the machine and examined the iron ladder and the carpet of lima beans. They came out quickly, shuddering with cold, and did husky little jigs to warm themselves up again. John had assumed that Urban had committed suicide, that the man haunted by fire had deliberately chosen ice, but now had to think again. They found Les’s three gloved fingers in the map pocket on Urban’s thigh, and when they lifted him and took him away, the shape of his body on the cardboard was printed dark with moisture and studded with the jade green of lima beans.
Oval stared at the three frozen fingers and the tip of the other one. It was the first time he’d heard of Les’s accident. “His left hand?” Oval said. “He was left-handed.”
“He used to be,” Tex said.
Oval looked around at Tex as if he’d said something in a foreign language, in tongues, Oval’s expression opinionless except for distant wonder. But his breath came short and a dark vein in his temple pulsed rapidly.
“I’ll go see him. I’ve got to tell Maria. I’ve got to,” he said to himself.
“I’ve got to do these things. Oh, faith, faith.” He looked out of himself, focusing on John. “Johnny?” He swallowed twice, unable to speak, so held out his arms to the machine, meaning would John take over, nodding the question.
“Sure,” John said.
Oval got up, a little crooked, as if he had a pain in his back, and left.
John reset the alarm bell and he and Tex ran the machine until it was empty of packages. The plant manager came by and said that the committee, by phone, had decided to shut it down now and dismantle it later, in the off-season. He said to tell Oval there was still a job for him in maintenance. “He’s a good man, but he was just a little over his head when he built this Rube Goldberg.” When Tex was out of hearing he said, “You Oval’s nephew or something? Maybe we could find a place for you.”
John said he had to go back to college, but thanks.
For the next three days Oval spent much of his time sitting in his car, which was parked under the tangerine tree in the parsonage yard. He didn’t want to talk to anyone but it was known that he was preparing himself for the memorial service for Thelma and Urban. Bonnie took care of the rest, such as the notices in the papers and helping Maria with Urban’s obituary. Urban had indeed suffered a broken neck, had probably been paralyzed and had then frozen to death. Internal evidence, such as the amassing of blood in the abdominal area and in the brain, confirmed this.
Urban had also kept up the full ten thousand dollars of his GI insurance. Because of this strange fact John had the dark thought, never spoken, that Urban might have taken a deliberate header off the ladder. Maybe domestic seductions had been threatening the purity of his guilt. Again he felt that at least he understood Urban’s uncompromising view of behavior better than that of the Church of the Science of the Way. He would stay for the memorial service because he had to—duty toward the living. He didn’t expect to hear anything but the usual, the comforting, everything he could never believe. In churches, when he had to go to churches, during prayer he could never bow his head; he gazed horizontally, because it would be hypocritical not to, with the visual acuity of a scholar in an alien culture. It was as if, at funerals especially, he wrote in his head his own stern oration, which had nothing to do with God.
While he waited he sold his motorcycle to Phil the mechanic for a hundred dollars. This gave him in all nine hundred seventy-four dollars, which he put in traveler’s checks, more money than he’d ever had in hand before, enough to make him think of buying a car and driving back. But in the end, remembering the daunting expanses of his country, he bought an airline ticket. The DC-3 would make just seven stops and he would be in Boston in a day. He’d take a train called the Peanut north to Leah.
There was still no note from Dory, and when he thought that maybe she had seen through him and was no longer interested in him, he felt caught out and hurt, a strange, fading regret, as if in another life he had not behaved honorably.
31
She wants no expectations. She wants not to expect. Her mind is reluctant. She prefers to retire from what she has learned she is—offspring of the race whose qualities she prefers not to have. That seems to her beyond argument. How cruel she is to her mother and father. She can’t explain it to them because it is too dangerous; in her previous life all she did was explain; now she knows they don’t want to know what she might explain. John Hearne just disappeared, but that’s all abstract, his business, human business.
She watches varnish cracks and bumps, a map of a thousand villages.
She is not lost; she is deliberate in everything. If only she could will herself out of this house, literally imagine her body away from the people she makes unhappy.
Dr. Winston has been called—unheard of. Where is the blood, the fracture, the fever? She won’t eat, Doctor. She won’t get up except to go to the toilet.
Can’t you discuss this somewhere else? All humans squat and strain, so what? Stuff their craws, brag, strut, fuck, kill and squat again. Danger. Danger. There is a perfectly valid reason for choosing one state over another. She chooses sleep, carefully. The connotations of nearly every dream or waking vision are human, creations of the human. Arguments are dangerous to peace because they are human. To retire is not, Mother, to hate you or the human race, just to have understood it and its games. Monopoly, sex, war, torture. Red Rover, come over—a memory of a memory of enthusiasm, unregretted.
When he first put his hands on her breasts, how stupid that pleasure was, because she didn’t suspect his contempt. There is no pleasure in humiliation, memory multiplying the horror of having been a fool. Danger here, but not the greatest danger.
Cynthia, right here now, says it was all because Yvonne was of royal blood, bar sinister, and was so gentle, but when she left she was just polite. Summer is over, that quick lifetime. How are you, Dory?
Robert, on the chair, asks, How’re you doing? Dibley stands near the door, biting the edge of his thumb, his elbow in the air.
We love you, Cynthia says. We want you to get dressed and come with us. We’re going to climb Cascom Mountain and eat lunch at the top. Robert has his father’s car. It’s a beautiful day.
Yvonne took Cynthia to the studio because she suspected Debbie would be there, and didn’t want to go alone. Why didn’t she get Mr. King to go, then?
If we are all vile, what difference does it make if we’re tortured? We deserve the agony. Goodbye.
Dory? Dory?
She must escape into an idea that is fascinating but emotionless, a landscape of the will. Her father varnished that trim board long ago, but sunlight and heat have created on its surface the most delicate cracks and shapes and continents, each meaning precisely what it means, only to change into another, even more convincing precision. In the distance, through mist, is a pagoda with winged roofs, gilded dragons and trees so old their leaves have never been green. It is all ageless, cool and inhuman, just visual. There is no sound, no tinkling, no bonging, no wind, though it is real. Now it
is a forest and it is impossible to find one delicate branch that even suggests a dragon or a winged roof. There is a bird of paradise, and another, and a golden tree snake. Beyond is a wooded hill rising into cloud, all ancient and amber but not monochrome because amber and its variations are all the colors there are in the spectrum of this ancient world.
A varnished board. They are gone. Her scream of exasperation was not directed at them but came out of her for its own reasons, like vomit. Go away, Ma. I’m being sweetly, passively reasonable. If you say I need a bath I’ll have a bath, but you will not force me into attending your unhappiness. I don’t want to hurt you but I am in constant danger.
32
One reason he’d never even entered the Church of the Science of the Way, a minor reason, was that he didn’t have the proper clothes. He still had the use of the Indian Pony, so he rode downtown, found a men’s shop a little more conservatively Eastern than the rest and bought himself a dark sport coat, slacks, shirt, a tie with narrow regimental stripes and brown loafers. This costume would do on the plane, too. He was, after all, a debonair young blade and who knew what adventures lay ahead? That mood was fleeting, as if it were something he’d grown out of, or something he’d regretfully lost.
He caught Oval on one of his trips from his car to the bathroom or the kitchen, and said, “I guess I’d better go back East after the services.”
“So you’re coming to church?”
“Yes.”
Oval nodded.
“Why do you sit in your car all the time?” John asked him.
“Because I don’t know where I should be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe I don’t belong anywhere. I’ve failed at everything I’ve ever tried.” Oval said this as if it were a simple matter of fact, and went on to his car.
Bonnie had been watching from the kitchen window. She met John in the front hall. “What did he say?” she said.
“He said he’d failed at everything he’d ever tried.”
“He’s so wrong! John, I’ve tried everything to get to him. I’m just frantic! I’m afraid for him. He tries what he can’t do, that’s his trouble. He never thinks about the things he can do, he just does them and never thinks they’re anything special. Who can talk to him? I’ve tried, but what have I got to give?”
“I don’t know,” he said, thinking that he shouldn’t be having this conversation, that it wasn’t a proper subject.
“So like the dumb twerp I am I got mad and went to pack up and leave. That was a help, wasn’t it? He’s got all these terrible things on his mind and because he won’t take what I offered I act like a jilted high school girl. God!”
“But you didn’t leave.”
“I couldn’t. All the time I was packing I knew I couldn’t. And then he heard about Thelma and I felt so cheap.”
Cheap was what John Hearne felt, too, for the reasons of his continuing intolerance and his own departed, petty fantasies.
He was still in this nervous state at ten of eleven the next morning when, dressed in his new clothes, he walked through the back garden toward the small Gothic church. He felt empty and vulnerable, a mood that could surprise him when any small accident, or a bit of normal cruelty such as a cat playing with a lizard, reminded him that the universe was absolutely indifferent and merciless. In this state he didn’t know what he would do. From what impervious calm could he listen to sorrowing friends speak of the dead? He could run away; whenever that option came to mind it was as if he had already run away, and another small shame was marked against his soul. Soul? Temperament plus history; what you think of yourself; the entity that computes all of the pain you’ve caused, measured in cruces; what goes to heaven to meet Mama Daddy Bonnie John.
Villa Mesa Street was yellow with the monotonous glareless sunlight of Tulaveda. The cars in the small parking area and along the street were all clean, probably washed for the occasion. He stood on the sidewalk in the shade of a mulberry tree, on dried purple bird shit, watching the dressed-up people gravely going into the church. To enter a church, rather than to pass by a church, was as unnatural as looking into another person’s shoe. There were churches and shoes everywhere, but to look into one, to see where the toes bulged out the leather and the bunions smoldered in the incense of foot, or to see where people professed belief unto death in something they had never seen—that was too strange and personal.
Washington and Ertrude Johnson, approaching the church, were dressed in somber, shiny black. She was gaunt, with bent calves, and heels that protruded like spurs. With them was a large male child who walked heavily and looked about with the lopsided eyes of retardation. There was Phil the mechanic, his wife and two of their older children. The matronly woman in a purple dress and black shoes was, he recognized from the brochures, Dr. Addie Walmberg, who lectured upon God’s humor. Maybe they were all there, Oval’s and Urban’s colleagues, such as the Rev. Dr. Pierce G. Pierce, D.D., and Prince Grégoire Ushant, the ninety-five-year-old in the thirty-five-year-old body. A tall man in his sixties, wearing a clerical collar, climbed the steps. The people of the congregation looked scrubbed, dressed up, glowing and ordinary.
He went among them into the religious hush and the pious dimensions of the church. The holy vault rose over the intent people who sat on heavy wooden benches. At the gable end of the arched vault was a tall stained-glass window in somber reds and bottle blue around a yellow cross. Clerestories above the stone pediments in the wooden arches made the light on the floor of the church seem to have no source because it cast no shadows. Some architect had known how to make the most of what height and length he’d been allowed. The pulpit, or podium, was carved from a once-bright wood like oak, now brown under cracked varnish. The people came at least once a week into this room purely designed to erode their judgment.
Flowers were everywhere in sconces, the tall, amputated funeral flowers that people thought beautiful, broad scents and gaudy tints among fairy ferns. He had always thought them—snapdragons, chrysanthemums, gladiolas, dahlias, irises, daffodils, gardenias, whatever they were, the whole sweet cloying panoply—an aesthetic hypocrisy before the honest rotting dead. Thelma and Urban had been cremated and weren’t here, of course, but perhaps those scents were once more useful than symbolic—like, say, Worcestershire sauce, created to hide the taint in meat.
He observed from the last row, in his health easily patient and silent, letting all this pass. They were here today to absolve the living, to give good news, to sift out of the dust an invincible optimism, ’cause, man, we need it! Oh, bullshit, Hearne; this ceremony cares not for you or your opinions.
There was Bonnie, at the harmonium, her large breasts official, her narrow waist at attention. The pedals began to clunk like a distant pump, and then the treble whine of a hymn familiar in melody made thin slices, or narrow golden threads, of sound. He didn’t know where he’d ever heard the hymn; it was as if he had inherited that sequence of notes from ancestors.
Oval stepped to the podium, the pants of his blue suit wrinkled at the lap, and said in his plain boyish tenor, “We will turn to hymn number one thirty-three.”
People reached for books in the racks before them, so John did too. In the rustling of pages, the muted creaks and coughs as the docile made ready, he quickly scanned the first verse of the hymn and found it undangerous.
For the beauty of the earth,
For the beauty of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies,
(refrain)
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
But he was unprepared for the voices, which without hesitation soared, a gale of voices at sudden confident force. These motley people surprised him into an insecurity of emotion he quickly prepared to control, if he could. It was not just their wholehearted unison, but their skill. Every space in the church sang and answered with song. He missed, in the purity of the sounds,
a verse and refrain, but then read the next as they sang.
For the joy of ear and eye,
For the heart and mind’s delight,
For the mystic harmony
Linking sense to sound and sight,
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
The joy of ear and eye: where did they come by such plain language, dangerous to him? Linking sense to sound and sight, alliteration okay in these circumstances. This might mean too much, too clearly. Thelma and Urban, blessed and cursed by perception.
For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth, and friends above,
For all gentle thoughts and mild,
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
Pierced by invincible cliche, his proud judgment faltered and stumbled not toward belief but toward appreciation. This brought tears to his eyes, real messy hot tears that swung back and forth in his lids like bilge in a boat.
He would not allow it; his was a true and justified arrogance.
Oval said, “Let us spend a few moments in silent memory and prayer,” and bowed his head.
The silence contained echoes without source, a sigh as if a great mouth breathed over the church. The innocent wind of voices, still so clear in memory, seemed to have swept from him some of his resistance. In defense of his status as an observer from the real world he looked at people, the backs of heads and partial profiles. There was Maria, in black, in the front row with an older man who wore a pencil mustache. Three men in American Legion uniforms sat behind them.
Throats cleared here and there, and a child’s plain, reasonable voice asked, “Why are they? Why are…why are they?” and was hushed.
Oval raised his head and the people raised theirs. Oval blinked several times, as if his eyes hurt, his lids clenching down to meet the muscles of his face. He said, “Pastor Rittheuber—Ozzie Rittheuber—of the Church of Love and Triumph, Biosophic, was a great favorite of Thelma’s. She called him Uncle Ozzie, and for her he always had a smile and words honest and gentle, in the manner of the Christed soul he is. He has asked if he might share with us a few of his thoughts.”
The Moon Pinnace Page 38