Crippen

by John Boyne

  ‘Thank you, Lord,’ he replied dutifully, blinking through the brightness.

  ‘God’s glorious work,’ she would state while she cheerfully swept the house clean of dust and cobwebs or cleared the grime from the windows with a greasy rag. ‘Give thanks, Hawley, to the good Lord for creating dirt all around us, that we may have the honour of cleaning up in His name.’

  ‘Thank you, Lord,’ he replied suspiciously, coughing at the dust in the air.

  Dinnertimes were a quiet affair in the Crippen household. Samuel would return from his job at the grocery store by six o’clock, when his wife would lay out a spartan meal for the three of them. Typically, this consisted of a dry cooked vegetable and perhaps a little chicken or pork, undercooked slightly, the resulting diarrhoea or digestive problems being offered up for the poor souls in purgatory.

  ‘God’s glorious bounty,’ Jezebel would say, smiling at her menfolk beatifically and extending her palms, as if she was the reincarnation of Jesus at the Last Supper. ‘Give thanks, Hawley, to the good Lord for blessing us with such a sumptuous feast.’

  ‘Thank you, Lord,’ he replied, his stomach churning, his legs weakening as his bowels began to give way to God’s glorious digestive problems.

  As Jezebel entered her thirties and began to see God’s glory in every blessed moment of the day, Samuel began to spend less and less time at home, preferring either to work late at the grocery store or to spend the evening at a local saloon, where he would drown his frustrations in alcohol. While this behaviour was frowned upon by his wife, he maintained enough distance to ignore her complaints. They mainly came when he was drunk anyway, so they hardly mattered. On one particular occasion he returned home towards midnight, unsteady on his feet, his cheeks puffy, his nose red and leading his way like the Christmas reindeer. He entered the house, singing a bawdy song which related to the adventures of a well-endowed sailor and his visit to a certain house of ill-repute in the city of Venice.

  ‘You are not the man I married,’ Jezebel cried in disgust, fetching a kitchen pail as her husband’s bloodshot eyes and unsteady expression made it clear that he might soon be emptying the contents of his stomach on to the living-room floor. ‘Coming home at this time of night in such a condition. And in front of our Hawley. What have you been drinking anyway? Whiskey? Beer? Tell me, Samuel.’

  ‘God’s glorious alcohol,’ he replied in a sing-song voice, before belching loudly, adopting an amazed expression and falling unconscious to the floor.

  ‘Thank you, Lord,’ Hawley intoned piously, as he had been taught.

  It was Jezebel’s idea that her son be taken out of the village school and instead be educated at home by herself. Hawley didn’t mind; at school he was used to being bullied because of his dark, formal clothing, which made him look like Oliver Twist when he was acting as a funeral walker for the Sowerberrys, and because of his delicate features, which forced some of the boys to suggest that he was not one of them at all, but a lousy girl. Investigations proved otherwise, leaving the child feeling even more humiliated and despised than before.

  ‘We will begin with Bible studies.’ Jezebel told him on their first morning of home study. ‘And then, before our second period of Bible studies, you will start to learn to read properly, using the Book of Psalms as your text. After a period of reflection on the Mysteries of the Cross, we will end classes for the day with some soul-enhancing Bible studies.’ By the age of nine, Hawley was able to recite all one hundred and fifty Psalms in order, and he knew the exact line of ancestry from Adam to Jesus Christ. No one begat anyone without Hawley being in on the action. Jezebel made a party trick of it for Christmas, when the Crippens and the Quirks would gather together in her front room for a sumptuous feast of barley water and dry cake.

  ‘Who begat Enos, Hawley?’ she would ask, plucking a name from her memory as the boy screwed up his face and worked his way through Genesis in his mind.

  ‘Seth,’ he said.

  ‘Correct! And who begat Methuselah?’

  Hawley thought again. ‘Enoch,’ he pronounced.

  ‘He most certainly did, the filthy beast. And Nimrod?’ she continued, pushing the game to breaking point. ‘Who begat Nimrod?’

  ‘Cush,’ said Hawley triumphantly.

  ‘Cush it was! And Nimrod became a mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar,’ she continued gleefully, clapping her hands together in orgasmic delight, the crazed sparkle of religious fervour skipping like electricity from her sunken eyes.

  For a woman who couldn’t bear to be touched by her husband’s hands, Samuel could not help but feel that she seemed a little obsessed with the process of begetting. He wished for his son to lead a more active life outside the home, and he was sure that the boy was missing out on some of the joys of childhood.

  ‘Missing out?’ Jezebel asked, laughing at her husband’s imbecility. ‘You think this boy is missing out on something? How ridiculous. Watch this, you stupid man. Hawley—“For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked”?’

  ‘ “For there are no bands in their death,” ’ Hawley replied immediately from his position in the living-room window where he was sitting and staring at the sky in silent contemplation. He moved his eyes slowly from left to right as he spoke, as if reading the words directly from the page. ‘ “But their strength is firm,” ’ he added, almost as an afterthought.

  ‘Psalm number?’

  ‘Seventy-three, Mother.’

  ‘Verses?’

  ‘Two and three.’

  Jezebel looked at her husband triumphantly, her yellowing teeth pushing through her lips as she tried to control her rising emotions. ‘Samuel Crippen,’ she announced, ‘your son’s a prodigy.’

  The early teenage years brought yet more strife for the boy Hawley. A sudden inflammation of acne around the time of his thirteenth birthday coincided with an almost pathological amount of bed-wetting, an act which caused great consternation in the Crippen household. Waking every morning at five a.m., his bed sheets soaked as a result of his exotic dreams, he would lie awake in dread of daybreak and the moment when his mother would enter the room, turn up her nose at the foul stench in the air and brand him a wicked boy and worse than a baby, beating him soundly about the head. When she overheard Samuel informing his son of a convenient way to cut down on these nightly emissions, she collapsed on the wooden floor of the kitchen in a swoon, bruising the back of her head badly, and had to be revived with smelling salts.

  And yet, as time went by, Hawley did in fact manage to find in his tumultuous adolescence the opportunity to develop his own interests. His education began to extend beyond the Book of Revelations as he took it upon himself to read literature, poetry and works of non-fiction in the secrecy of the small library in Ann Arbor. As a fifteen-year-old he discovered a book entitled The Human Body & Its Many Strange & Unusual Functions, by Dr A. K. Larousse; and this became his new Bible as he digested every word pertaining to the study of the bodily organs and the respiratory functions. The Larousse work led him to many others on the same subject, and his later teenage years became fuelled by his study of science and biology, his theories about the creation of the universe, the workings of human and animal bodies, and the very nature of life. Most of these books he kept secret from his mother, who believed the study of science to be sinful, since it was attempting to understand the mind of God.

  ‘If God wanted us to live for ever,’ she pointed out, ‘he never would have visited the seven plagues upon us. Now there was a God who knew how to deal with evil. He needs to get back a little of that old chutzpah, if you ask me.’

  Without Jezebel’s knowledge, Hawley began to purchase and store under his mattress copies of Scientific American, a brand new and radical publication from the state of New York, pulling them out only late at night when his parents were asleep in their separate rooms and he could light his candle and flick through t
heir contents, furtively licking his lips with every new morsel of information which came his way. Each page seemed to offer a new theory or the possibility of a scientific revolution. Every contributor was working on new medicines, intricate equations or new definitions of words such as ‘life’, ‘man’ and ‘existence’. Hawley could only hold his breath in excitement each month in anticipation of what would come next.

  By his seventeenth birthday, however, the stack of Scientific American magazines beneath Hawley’s mattress began to grow more noticeable, despite the fact that they were spread out evenly from pillow to base, forming an extra layer of inquisitive softness. Returning home from the library one afternoon in June, he sat on his bed to remove his boots and was surprised to feel a little more give under him than usual. Lifting the bed slightly to see what changes had taken place, he was horrified to discover that his collection of magazines had been stolen. His face grew pale and then scarlet with embarrassment; he felt his stomach contract inside him and was forced to sit down again, his heart pounding within his chest as he tried to think up an explanation. He waited in despair for his mother to come through the door in anger but there was no sign of her as yet, and it was only when he heard his father return home in the evening that he was summoned downstairs, where the pile of magazines he had invested in over the past two and a half years had been placed one on top of another on the kitchen table. He stared at the collection as if he had never laid eyes on any of them before and he swallowed nervously; although ready to deny them, they were still precious to him and he wanted them back unharmed. His mother stood by the fireplace, her arms folded, her face betraying her fury, while Samuel stood somewhere between them, unsure what position he was supposed to be taking.

  ‘All this time I thought I knew you,’ Jezebel said. ‘I thought you were a decent boy. I thought I had brought you up right.’

  ‘You do! I am! You did!’ he protested, answering each charge deliberately, but before he could say anything further her shouts were drowning his voice out.

  ‘A decent boy doesn’t keep filth like this under his mattress. It’s disgusting! Have you seen these magazines?’ she asked her husband, who shook his head sheepishly before picking one up and flicking through it carefully, his excited face becoming more and more disappointed as each page was turned and he came closer to the end.

  ‘They’re interesting to me,’ Hawley pleaded. ‘It’s science. It’s educational.’

  ‘It’s filth,’ she insisted. ‘Why on earth would anyone waste their money on diseased rubbish like this?’

  ‘I read them for the articles,’ he said defensively, his voice rising ever so slightly. ‘I’m interested in the human body—’

  ‘Hawley! Not in this house!’

  ‘In how the world was created. In what we are.’

  Jezebel shook her head furiously and plucked the magazine from her husband’s hands, throwing it into the fire then pushing it further into the coals with an iron poker.

  ‘Mother, no!’ Hawley cried as she reached for the next magazine, and the next one, and the one after that.

  ‘It’s for your own good,’ she said, watching as his years of study charred and flickered in the fireplace. ‘Better that these pages should be burning here right now than you should spend an eternity roasting in Hades’ flames. I couldn’t live with myself if I knew you were spending eternity in Hell.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ shouted Hawley in disgust, the first time he had ever raised his voice in this house. Both his parents looked at him in amazement as his face grew red and eyes became wild with anger. ‘Just ridiculous!’ he repeated. ‘And these magazines fascinate me. Don’t you understand, I want to be a man of science.’

  ‘Science?’ Jezebel shouted in amazement. ‘This science is the devil’s work, nothing more. Is that what I educated you for?’

  ‘I don’t care, that’s what I want,’ he cried, disgusted by her ignorance. And watching as the magazines disappeared in flames up the chimney, he found the words to express what it was he was put on earth to do. ‘I intend to study medicine,’ he told his parents. ‘I will be a great scientist.’ He leaned in towards his mother so that she had to hold herself steady to prevent herself from taking a step back in fear. ‘Maybe that’s God’s plan for me,’ he added quietly.

  Jezebel threw a hand to her mouth, as if he had just uttered the words which would bring damnation around all their ears.

  ‘God’s glorious plan, Hawley,’ said Samuel, confused, perhaps a little drunk.

  With Hawley’s twenty-first birthday came a series of changes. Much to his mother’s disgust and his father’s surprise, he started to assert himself, refusing to allow Jezebel to dictate the terms of his existence any longer. Risking her censure, but refusing to ask her permission, he continued to purchase copies of Scientific American, and now he offered them pride of place on the top of his dresser, where any casual visitor could take note of his perversion. To these he added quarterly issues of the American Journal of Human Medicine as well as The Medical Practitioner’s Bi-Monthly Review, scholarly works whose in-depth analysis of the state of the sciences in the United States would have been beyond the reach of most laymen, but whose complex writings and diagrams fascinated the young Crippen and convinced him that here was the life he craved. Their gratuitous display, removed from under the mattress, justified them and made Jezebel think twice before consigning this latest bunch to the fireplace.

  He applied to the University of Michigan to study medicine, but it was only when he received their prospectus that he realized that a desire on one’s part to study was secondary in the mind of such an establishment to the ability of a potential student to pay for it. In order to become a doctor, he would have to undertake four years of courses at a rate of over $500 per year. Since leaving school he had worked as a grocery clerk at his father’s store, but he still earned no more than $3 a week, a third of which he was forced to return to his mother in order to pay for his food and board. There was no possibility whatsoever that he could afford the tuition fees.

  ‘You have to understand,’ he said to his parents one evening when he explained his dilemma to them, ‘that being a doctor is the most important thing in the world to me. I feel it’s my destiny, my vocation in life.’

  ‘Now, Hawley, don’t use words like that in such a context,’ Jezebel said, delighted that he was coming begging to her again. Although her attitude towards his interests had relaxed a little over the previous couple of years, she could not help but still protest at what she considered her son’s anti-Christian sentiments. ‘A vocation only exists when the good Lord calls you to His service.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what He’s doing,’ he replied. ‘Calling me to serve the sick, to make them better. Perhaps He wants me to be a doctor. It’s a noble profession, after all.’

  ‘The Lord sees the art of medicine as a heathen one, you know that. Why else would He visit sickness upon the little children if there were others who could simply take that sickness away? It is best to leave well alone. His will be done.’

  Hawley sighed. He had recently grown a moustache and had taken to stroking it gently in times of stress. He tried not to lose his temper, since that would only lessen his chances of success. ‘Mother, please,’ he said quietly. ‘Can’t you see how important this is to me?’

  ‘How much do you need?’ Samuel asked, not daring to look at his wife, although he could feel her venomous stare darting through his body like a thousand spears and he knew he would pay for it later.

  ‘The course costs five hundred dollars per year—’

  ‘Five hundred dollars?’ Jezebel cried in surprise. ‘It’s out of the question.’

  ‘It’s expensive, but it’s worth it,’ Hawley protested. ‘I can manage perhaps one hundred dollars a year if I get a night job. It would be difficult to study during the day and work at night, certainly, but these are the sacrifices I would make.’ He added this last part to appeal to his mother’s sense of martyrdom.<
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  ‘So you need four hundred dollars a year over four years,’ said Samuel.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sixteen hundred dollars.’

  ‘Effectively.’

  ‘It’s absolutely impossible,’ Jezebel stated firmly.

  ‘I suppose we could re-mortgage the store,’ his father said, thinking about it and stroking his face now with a gesture that imitated his son’s. ‘The bank might allow it, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll—’

  ‘We are not re-mortgaging the store,’ Jezebel said. ‘Samuel, it’s taken us all these years to finally own it outright and I am not going back into debt just so that Hawley can carve out a place in the devil’s quarters for himself.’

  ‘Oh, Mother!’ he cried in frustration. ‘If you could just look beyond your own self for a moment.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Hawley,’ she said. ‘I know it’s a disappointment to you, but you know how I feel and you cannot ask me to change. I simply will not see a son of mine move into a profession like that. If you feel you have a vocation to help people, then why not become a teacher? The state is crying out for young teachers and you would be perfectly suited to such a life. Or a cleric?’

  ‘But I don’t want to teach,’ he shouted. ‘And I certainly don’t want to preach. I want to be a doctor! I want to practise medicine! Why do you find that so hard to understand?’

  Jezebel closed her eyes and rocked back and forth in her chair, humming ‘Amazing Grace’ quietly to herself. This was her usual method of suggesting that the conversation had come to an end.

  Hawley looked across at his father, his last line of defence, but Samuel merely shrugged and glanced towards his wife as if to imply that hers was the final decision and there was nothing more he could do about it. Frustrated beyond reason, Hawley had little choice now but to contact the university and tell them that, despite his desire to become a student there, he could not afford the tuition fees. He hoped briefly that a scholarship might be offered to him; but instead the admissions board accepted his decision immediately and thanked him for his interest in a letter which showed no hint of sympathy for his situation.