The Gospel Hall was light red brick with white double doors and plain in comparison to the United Church or the Presbyterian or the Baptist, which was Patsy’s church. The pews were pale golden oak and sturdy, they had been built square cornered, without decorative curves. The pulpit was just a very high table with a chair behind it and the glass in the narrow windows along each side of the hall had been frosted but not stained, there were no biblical figures pieced together with small bits of glass. The walls were cream coloured and on every wall there were framed pictures of Jesus, either head and shoulders or full body in a white robe, with his face glowing, with women or children at his feet.
Patsy knew some of the children who attended the meetings from school, a few went to her church, some were farm kids who were brought in especially on Monday nights. They were all very young. The man who spoke to the children was Patsy’s mother’s second cousin, he had the same last name as her grandmother, Watson, although his branch had got separated, she’d never seen him at any family gatherings. She saw him only on Monday nights from the November she was ten until the following February, never before, and never after.
The meetings always started with attendance and then singing. There was a piano at the front, played by a thin and energetic woman Patsy didn’t know, whose voice was not as strong as she assumed it was. Mr. Watson was helped by an assistant who had a clear tenor voice and led them with hearty enthusiasm through the children’s hymns: “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and “Jesus Loves Me,” and “He’s the Lily of the Valley” and, near Christmas, some of the carols Patsy liked to sing. After the singing, there were games, contests.
If you were chosen to stand up and recite the names of the books of the Old or the New Testaments, you could win a pastel bookmark, blue or green or mauve or yellow or pink. At the top of each bookmark there was a gentle scene featuring lambs or flowers or children and below this a Bible verse written out in small script. If you could recite the books of either of the Testaments backwards, you got two bookmarks. If you had memorized correctly the verses assigned by Mr. Watson the previous week, you got still more, and when you’d earned enough, and if you had perfect attendance, you were presented with a child’s Testament. These were white leather, soft and small, very easy for a child to hold. If you held your Testament tightly closed, the edging on the pages could lead you to believe that inside each thin page was dark red.
Patsy quickly established herself as a dependable voice for a fast and precise naming of the books of the Bible, forwards or backwards. She took pride in a perfect recitation, or an exact rendering of a verse; she liked leaving her pew and going to the front to retrieve her winnings. By the end of it all she had five Testaments. The other children made no secret of the fact that they thought this was unfair, but she didn’t care. She thought if they’d wanted to make it fair, they would have just handed everything out. She kept her Testaments with other treasures in a skate box under her bed, a place she assumed her mother didn’t check.
After the contests Mr. Watson gave his talk, which was never very pleasant. He started out standing at the pulpit and then paced back and forth from one side of the room to the other, pausing to make eye contact with some of the children, sometimes stopping to touch one of them on the shoulder. He held his zippered black Bible tight in his hand, raising it high in the air and shaking it when he wanted to make a point. His voice had a granular edge to it, and he knew how to make the children listen. He held them by pushing the pitch of his words high and suddenly dropping it low again, and by alternately whispering and shouting. As he talked the children settled, their ordinary fidgeting ceased.
He said his only concern was their eternal lives. He had long studied the Bible and he knew, oh, he knew what lay ahead for the children if they did not take Jesus Christ as their own personal saviour. He painted cruel pictures with his voice so they’d know. There would be darkness blacker than night, and foul, monstrous creatures and a wide rushing river of fire. Sinners would crowd together in search of comfort. Flames would lick at their flesh forever and there would be no death to release them. “There is no mystery,” he would shout. “It’s all here for us in Revelation, if only we’d listen.”
It didn’t take long for the church to become crowded with his exotic images, and Patsy often had to resist the urge to run to the back of the room and turn off all the lights. He created a Hell so exact and vibrant that she would easily be able to picture it for the rest of her life. He had information about Heaven as well, which he always held back until the end, soothing them with promises.
In February, Mr. Watson got sick for a while and two of the people who helped him, tall, lank men with long necks and prominent Adam’s apples, gave the talks. They worked as a team and they weren’t nearly as good as Mr. Watson, although they used more or less the same words. Partly to fill the time, they introduced an opportunity for questions at the end of their talks, something Mr. Watson would not have done, and Patsy took the chance to ask the question she’d been sitting with for quite some time. Was everybody who didn’t attend the Gospel Hall doomed? She was confident the answer would be no, she expected a short, complicated discussion about exceptions and second chances, the proof found somewhere in all those pages, all those verses, but she got a surprise. Unfortunately, she was told, and wasn’t it sad, wasn’t it truly sad, everyone else was going to go to Hell, it was clear in the Word of God. She put up her hand again, holding it firmly up as she waited through several questions about Lazarus and the woman at the well, and when one of the men finally nodded at her, Patsy asked him would her friend from school who went to the Roman Catholic church spend eternity in Hell? There was sincere regret in the man’s voice when he answered her and then he brightened. “You can witness,” he said. “You could save her.” After the meeting Patsy walked straight home, with Eleanor, who told her she was pretty stupid if she didn’t see that coming.
For a while she would leave the house on Monday nights and only pretend to go to the meetings. She stopped instead at the creek to sit near the barrels of pickles or wandered the cold streets on the lookout for rare or unique human activity. Finally, she just stayed home. When her mother asked why she wasn’t going any more, Patsy said, “Because they’re all crazy.” Her mother said she was afraid that was a distinct possibility, although normally she would have outlawed any such talk. Family, even the most distant of cousins, was always to be given the benefit of the doubt, the worst that could be said being nothing at all, a silence when a name was mentioned, to allow each listener a private bit of time to remember the reason for the absence of words.
The five white Testaments stayed in the skate box under Patsy’s bed through years of dustings until she packed up for university, when her mother turned her room into a sometime guest room, emptying a few drawers, moving the furniture round. Patsy never asked what she did with them.
2: GRACE
Patsy’s friend Carol, who was Roman Catholic, had an uncle who was in an iron lung. Sunday afternoons were often used by families for short car trips to visit people and on one of these afternoons Patsy accepted an invitation from Carol’s mother to visit the uncle. She said his town was only forty minutes away and they would easily be back by supper time. One of the things Patsy valued about having friends was getting to know the people who surrounded them: rude older brothers, grandfathers who would sometimes talk another language, crazy aunts who visited from Sudbury. She accepted the invitation without calling her parents, there was nothing unusual about a trip to see somebody, and they got into the car and started down the highway. Patsy sat in the front beside Carol, at the window. The snow was almost gone from the fields and the highway was dark and dry. Carol’s mother said she liked a dry highway.
They hadn’t got very far when Carol’s mother asked if Patsy knew what an iron lung was. Patsy answered no, she didn’t, trying to make her voice sound ready for an explanation. She wasn’t told much about iron lungs but she did hear about the uncle. Ca
rol’s mother said that he had been a normal, active boy like other boys and then when he was twelve he got very sick. He had to spend a long time in the hospital in the city and then he came home with his iron lung, which was smaller than the big hospital lungs, designed for home use. She said children were safer now, with all the vaccines. She said he had always been smart, and interested in what went on. She said he liked visitors.
The house where the uncle lived was really the grandmother’s house, one of those narrow yellow-brick houses with a side porch, just like a farmhouse, but built in town. When they pulled into the driveway, the grandmother was already on the porch ready to greet them, drying her hands on the tea towel she had tucked into the belt of her navy blue wool dress. She had hugs for everyone except Patsy, but she smiled a generous smile and put her hand firmly on Patsy’s shoulder, guiding her in and through the front room straight to the kitchen, where the table was set with tea and bread and butter plates and a tin of fresh cookies, oatmeal and macaroons and hermits. There was a door off the kitchen to a bedroom, and hanging beside the door against green wallpaper, a repeated diagonal pattern of small faded tea kettles, there was a crucifix, similar to the one above the sofa in Carol’s living room. Patsy didn’t much like the Catholic cross, she preferred the empty Protestant cross because it was evidence that Jesus was gone, risen, but she was getting used to the twisted figure, she could see that it worked as a reminder.
Standing in the kitchen with her hands on the back of a chair, Patsy could hear the uncle quiedy calling “Hello, Hello,” and “Get in here.” They walked in and gathered around his bed, which was a high hospital bed. He looked middle-aged to Patsy, like a parent. He reached to take his sister’s hands in his own and she leaned down to kiss him. Carol approached and stretched to put her cheek on his and then she stood back and said, “This is my friend Patsy.”
He made a great fuss with his arms and with the muscles in his face. His voice was raspy, but strong enough. He said, “You, I’ve heard about,” and he laughed and then they all laughed together. Patsy could smell shaving cream in the air, and she saw that his pyjama bottoms were fresh and had been ironed.
The lung enclosed him from his armpits to just below his waist. It looked like a magician’s box, except that it was round and made of iron, and there were windows and dials and controls and hoses and a steady, mechanical noise and a sturdy cord which was plugged into the wall at the foot of the bed. There was a chair beside the bed piled high with thick newspapers from the city, and a dictionary. On the other side of the bed there was a shelf nailed into the wall, which held a radio and some paper and pens and a pair of scissors. On the wall above his head there was another crucifix, the same twisted figure, the same matted hair under the crown of thorns, the same face turned down and away.
Carol’s mother indicated that the girls should go back to the kitchen, so they went out to the table and sat down with Carol’s grandmother. She poured them tea and gave them each a bread and butter plate for their cookies and a small embroidered napkin. She asked them about school, she wanted to know exactly where they were in each of their subjects, geography especially, and was that odd man with the sports car still principal? She wanted to know all about their teachers, she hoped they were good and strict. “Listen to me now,” she said. “You’ll thank them.” Patsy could hear quiet talk from the bedroom, not many separate words but talk, most of it from Carol’s uncle. After a while Carol’s mother came out for a cup of tea and nodded to the girls that they should go in again. Carol took Patsy’s hand and she got up and followed her into the room, walking to the foot of the bed where there was a space to sit but Carol caught her eye just in time and gave her head a quick, almost imperceptible shake, so Patsy stood where she was. Carol pushed the newspapers and the dictionary from the chair to the floor so she could sit down, and then her uncle told her to get last Saturday’s Star from the mess she’d just made and find the crossword puzzle. He said they’d had a dickens of a time with it and he had been waiting for someone younger and smarter to come along. Although his hands were strong and he used them freely, Patsy noticed that the tips of some of his fingers were gone, and that his legs were very thin, and that his feet didn’t fill his socks. Carol found the newspaper and opened it to the puzzle. There were only two words not solved. One of the clues was “Soldier for hire (9),” and as soon as Carol read it out, Patsy knew the answer.
“Mercenary,” she said, pleased.
Carol’s uncle said, “Yes, indeed,” and he reached to his shelf and handed Carol a pen. “Fill that in,” he said.
The second clue was “Pungent (5).” Carol shrugged her shoulders, she’d played this game before, but Patsy closed her eyes hard to think. She couldn’t get it. “What letters have you got?” she asked.
Carol read out, “A, blank, R, blank, D.”
“Damn,” Patsy said. “I don’t know it.”
“Watch your mouth there,” the uncle said. “Just keep thinking. Give it a day or two.”
Carol’s mother stood leaning against the door-frame drinking tea, and before she could stop herself she said, “Acrid. It’s acrid, isn’t it?”
When it was time to go Patsy stood back while the others kissed him goodbye, wondering if she would be expected to take a turn. And then she just got ready and did it. He laughed when she approached him and she could feel his hand briefly on her neck, grateful and cold.
They backed out the driveway and when they got onto the highway Carol and her mother began to talk about other things, an upcoming shopping trip to the city, a winter coat that could not be let down and might as well be given to a cousin. Patsy stared at the mottled fields, at the fence posts and the fat black crows resting somehow on the barbed wire.
They dropped her off at home just before supper and it didn’t come until she was sitting at the table listening to her father say grace, thanking God for their food. It came full force, it was so bad she had to leave the table. Her mother, who had already seen one girl through adolescence and its attendant, sudden heartaches, would normally have just let her go but she remembered that she had no knowledge at all about how Patsy had spent the afternoon and she followed her up the stairs, leaving the rest of the family puzzled but unwilling to let their suppers get cold. She sat sidesaddle on Patsy’s bed and said, “You’d better tell me.” She waited, mute, until she heard the uncle’s name and then she put her hand on Patsy’s forehead, pushing her bangs off her face back into her longer hair. It was a gesture she had been using with success most of her adult life. It had never before been refused.
3: CRUCIFIXION
Two years later, six weeks before Christmas, Patsy’s mother and father decided to make their annual trip into the city for presents. Patsy was allowed to invite Carol and, as on other excursions, the two of them split off and shopped for a while on their own. They shared the cost of a Seventeen magazine and they searched out and found a special kind of ankle sock they couldn’t get at home and they bought soft tartan head scarves, which were to be worn loose over their heads like shawls, the tasselled ends thrown back carelessly over their shoulders. They had lunch at a Chinese restaurant, where they shared an egg roll and an oval plate of sweet-and-sour pork, and when they had finished and got their fortune cookies, which were vague but quite satisfactory, they walked down the decorated street toward the theatres, stopping in every store alcove for a few minutes to stare through the glass and choose the best ring, the best sweater, the best pair of shoes. Then they lined up for the movie. They had picked Spartacus, with Kirk Douglas.
Throughout the movie, in which there was more flesh exposed than either of them had ever seen, not counting the pale familiar flesh they’d seen at home and at the beach, Carol behaved outrageously. “He’s such a hunk,” she said, lowering herself in the plush seat, and again and again, loudly, grabbing Patsy’s arm, “Oh, he is such a hunk.” During one of the love scenes, a woman behind them who wore a bright red coat with a big fox collar rapped her hard on t
he head and whispered, “Stop that.”
“Battleaxe,” Carol muttered, and carried right on.
It was dark when they emerged from the theatre. The city streets, wet and bright with Christmas lights strung up on store fronts, were full of tired women in heavy coats lugging home full shopping bags, their families’ Christmas in the making, still boxed. As prearranged, the girls met Patsy’s parents for a smorgasbord supper at the Iroquois Hotel. They each had the three-dollar special, all the jumbo shrimp they wanted and pink roast beef with corn fritters instead of Yorkshire pudding.
In the car on the way home the girls sat in the back seat with the Seventeen and Patsy’s mother’s new penlight, examining and making judgements on the sophisticated images, each confidently choosing outfits or hairstyles that would be perfect for the other. Patsy’s father, quickly sick to death of all the talk about clothes and hair, caught Patsy’s eyes in his rearview mirror and asked what the movie was about.
Carol pushed her elbow deep into Patsy’s ribs and rolled her eyes, her face locked into her oh, if he only knew expression but Patsy quickly put on a fierce not now look.
“Gladiators,” Patsy said. “And slaves. They had an uprising against the Romans. Kirk Douglas was the leader.”
“Did the good guys win?” he asked.
Patsy gave a fair account. “At the end, Spartacus and his wife had a son,” she said, “who would grow up free. But Spartacus himself died on the cross. And there was a big battie, the Roman soldiers trapped the slaves down at the bottom of Italy. Afterwards the bodies were all piled up like coats on a bed.”
“‘Twas ever thus,” her father said, giving his attention back to the road.
Casino and Other Stories Page 6