by John Updike
“You know who he’s talking about, don’t you?”
“His enemies. The Lord’s enemies.”
“Not just any old enemies. He’s talking here about Gog, of the land of Magog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. You remember my telling you all who Gog really is, don’t you? Think about it—G, O, G.”
Clark let the letters revolve in his head, but all that came to him was how close they were to spelling GOD. These fervent believers seemed to him always skirting the edge of blasphemy. Blasphemy was everywhere, like sex in the movies before the Production Code was abandoned and scenes became explicit, and boring. He was staring down at a skeletal little stubby gun, still in its plastic wrap and form-fitting packing of Styrofoam. He guessed, from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, that this was an Uzi. “Made in the Holy Land,” Jesse said softly near his ear. “By the same Israeli craftsmen who have brought you the Galil rifle. The genius stroke of the Uzi was to fire a dandy little pistol bullet, nine millimeter, full metal jacket. A fold-out butt for compactness. G, O, G. What have you come up with?”
All this hay scratched Clark’s sinuses and the image flashed through his mind of how quickly the building would blaze if a single match were set to it. Sheep screaming below, ammunition exploding up here.
“Government of the Godless,” Jesse pronounced, with satisfaction, lowering the Kalashnikov. “That’s what Gog means, and that’s what we’ve got. This fake cowboy Reagan says he believes in God but he never goes to church, you’ll notice. Scared to step out of doors since that other movie actor plugged him.”
“Not an actor,” Clark said; though Jesse didn’t like to be corrected, Clark felt, after being lectured about guns, entitled to make a point. “A young psycho who was in love with an actress, Jodie Foster.” He passed over the M-16, glad to be rid of it. It wanted to come alive in his hands.
Jesse went on unheeding, “And he let the Pope into the country, to go around spreading his infernal poison. Come the Day of Reckoning, those two will be Number One and Number Two Antichrist, begging these mountains to fall on them and hide them from the Wrath of the Lamb. Sure as manure.”
Clark had been too young for the President’s films, but Knute Rockne—All American used to show up on Channel Nine and what enchanted Clark was the giant soaring kick, from the bystander in street clothes, and the dodging, dancing run the length of the field that had signalled Pat O’Brien that a miracle was at hand. You knew all along that somebody as good as George Gipp was bound to die. The world can’t have perfect people in it; it throws off all the tolerances. A strange thing was that, until he got to be President, Reagan’s greatest scenes were in bed: dying and asking they win one for the Gipper, in King’s Row asking where the rest of him was, and in bed with Bonzo.
The movies in Clark’s head were flickering too fast; he was beginning to panic up here in the dark triangular loft, with these mummified bundles of guns smelling of the oil that kept them eternally young. Jesse with his preternatural alertness sensed Clark’s discomfort and held the two rifles aloft in a priestly gesture, one in each hand, prolonging his disciple’s torment, confident that torment is what holds a disciple to the master. Torment is interesting.
“ ‘Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself,’ ” Jesse said. “Swordpower, they called it back then. Gunpower’s what it is now. ‘She brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron.’ Revelation, twelve five. I bet you thought Jesse’s rod meant my prick, didn’t you, brother Esau?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Clark said, moving around the bales toward the built-in ladder that would take him down from this claustrophobic, scratchy, oily-smelling loft.
Jesse followed him down. Clark watched the older man’s Birkenstocks grope, slippery and cautious, on each worn ladder rung. Jesse arrived on the barn floor, with its litter of stray straw and sheep pellets, slightly pink in the face, and panting. He wore a buckskin vest over a red flannel shirt and Clark could see his pounding heart moving the leather just slightly, like the featherless bald wings of a bird still in the nest. In a skip of his brain, a slip of the sprockets, Clark perceived Jesse as himself trapped, trapped by his mission, by something like live worms in his head. Jesse had the two-edged gift of inspiring pity as well as obedience. He said, as if apologizing for having alarmed Clark in the loft, “We need to defend ourselves, Esau. The unrighteous are relentless. Gog keeps saying we owe them taxes. County, state, Lower Branch Collector’s Office, we keep getting these envelopes with little windows in ’em every day. I ask Zebulun, what’s this and what’s that?—he doesn’t know. He’s a strong believer, and a mighty man of means, Zebulun, but he’s not a man for figures. Me neither, brother Esau. The ways of the world are not mine.”
Zebulun was a young rotund Hawaiian of complicated bloodlines who had been recruited by Matthew in a Pacific fishing expedition among Seventh-Day Adventists impatient for the Second Coming. This sect of Millerites, the most successful of a number, had explained the Great Disappointment by saying that on October 22, 1844, an investigation had been launched in Heaven to lay the proper foundation for the Judgment Day still in the future. Like other heroic believers—like Mormons or Moonies or, for that matter, adherents of the Athanasian Creed—they had grown over their fantastic elaborations a skin or scar of worldliness, of conventional dress, business success, and pleasant manners; yet underneath burned a pus of frustration, an inflammation of hope deferred. Matthew, like his namesake, could promise that “it is near, even at the doors.” Matthew told Zebulun that the Prophet had come, and was living a few miles north of Lower Branch, Colorado, in Burr County. Zebulun’s father owned Honolulu real estate and pineapple fields on the Big Island, and his access to wealth had given Zebulun the position as treasurer to the Temple, though he was in Clark’s view a butternut-colored mental defective tranquillized by Jesse’s good news. It must be he who was paying for the guns.
Jesse continued his lament: “Gog has more snoops in his employ than there are devils in downright Hell. Some Board of Sanitation inspectors has heard our plumbing isn’t up to code and wants to come sniffing at the septic tanks. Some damn social worker got as far as the inner gate, saying there’d been reports of child abuse—child abuse, when we’re giving our little ones the only true religion that will keep their hides from frying in the everlasting flames! Luke was on guard duty that day—he put a bullet next to her front tire and said he wouldn’t miss next time.”
“If I may say so—” Clark hesitated, testing.
“Speak, Esau.”
“You need better PR. There’s ways of avoiding such incidents. In Hollywood I used to work for the Nova Talent Agency—one of our jobs was to keep these young stars out of scrapes.”
“I never should have come down,” Jesse confided to him, taking off the little round wire-rim spectacles he had worn to admire the guns and rubbing his eyes with pinched fingers as if milking them of sadness. “I never should have come down this low.” From the wide square mouth of the barn they gazed east to the mountains above them, the grassy slopes turning into rocky heights and then to a distant ragged and unapproachable profile tinged even in August with snow. “Up there where I was, you don’t owe anybody and they don’t owe you. You eat what you shoot and burn what you cut.”
“So what happened?”
“I got the call. Faith filled me like a fire, hot and cold. I had to share the news.”
A half-moon was emerging from the blue sky, like a stone from an ebbing tide. “That must have been a wonderful feeling,” Clark said, politely.
“No, it was terrible. The responsibility was plumb terrible; it was pure terror. That’s what I do for you folks—I carry off the terror. To carry off the terror for all mankind—believe me, I begged for the cup to pass, but it didn’t. Back from ’Nam a couple years, and just finding my feet under me, looking for an old played-out ranch to make my own, and the Lord hit me with this.”
Among the things Jesse believed in was not wa
shing too often; his aura was at times, with a shift in the air, unbearably strong. Clark felt a desire to get away and meditate upon his vision of the guns. They inarticulately held a deep meaning for him, he believed.
“It hit me like a grizzly bear’s hug,” Jesse was telling him, caught up now in a movie of his past. “It put a weight on my mind that near drove me off my head. It’s damn lonely, being the bridegroom the universe has been waiting for.” Jesse looked at Clark intently, testing him, seeing if Esau would betray him. “Don’t tell the others everything I tell you. They’re simple folk, by and large, and can’t take too many mysteries at once.”
Clark said crisply, by way of concluding, “You better tell Zebulun you want me to help him. He wouldn’t believe it, if it came from me.”
Those four years he went to St. Andrew’s, in the middle of the Seventies, he visited his grandparents once a month on the average. He liked his grandmother fine, though he wondered why her leg had never been fixed by one of these simple operations that the doctor shows on television are always performing, and why she kept feeding him this rich sweet country food that had made her so fat she could hardly hobble between the stove and the kitchen table. But it was his grandfather he loved—the way people called him “Teddy” though he was over seventy, and the old man’s patient way of moving, of listening, of suffering in silence. If there was one thing Mom did not know how to do, it was suffer in silence. Though she had had fits of trying to be a mother, as he achieved the shape of a man she was generally distracted if not thousands of miles away, on location in Mexico or Louisiana. After 1970, when she hit forty, she weakened and began to accept TV work—older-woman roles in four- or six-part adaptations of last year’s popular novels, in costume dramas with an enlightened slant on ethnic issues. Her platinum-blonde phase was over; her hair went dark again. She played the obstructive but eventually enlightened and forgiving mother of an aristocratic Mexican girl involved in a romance with a peon turned revolutionary, and in another the Creole madame of a New Orleans bawdy house burned down for accepting clients of mixed blood. Older sisters, female executives, women with tortured pasts that had come back to haunt them—television, relatively cheesy though its production values were, embraced a world where middle-aged women could still play a role. The big screen, bewildered by its liberation from censorship, clung to the ideal of youthful beauty, and there was no shortage of fresh examples: Ali MacGraw, Katharine Ross, Karen Black, Maria Schneider. They wouldn’t last the way she had, Mom said, but then she hadn’t lasted the way Crawford had.
Teddy had more time on his hands now that his nephew Ira had energetically taken over the greenhouse, and he welcomed his teen-age grandson’s inarticulate companionship. The two were physically akin—stocky, squarish, with mild brown eyes and straight dull hair. Teddy walked with the boy around the town, pointing out vacant lots where there used to be houses, and new houses where there had been fields, or houses that had once been neighborhood grocery stores, or a dilapidated mansion where the man who founded the bottle-cap factory had lived, or a big run-down house gone into apartments which had belonged to his father’s sister and where he and Em had lived when newlywed, or shacks where black people had lived in deplorable conditions, when you think about it now. From his days as a mailman he knew the name of the family that had occupied every house years ago. Many of them were still there, some had passed on. Oh, he could tell a story or two, if regulations didn’t forbid it. A letter carrier, coming to the door every day, gets a sense of a house, and sees things—women in bathrobes asking if he’d like to come in for a coffee, cars parked out front that belonged on the other side of town, children left unattended squalling themselves blind upstairs, signs of the heart going out of a house by the peeling paint and broken screen doors. “You can tell,” he told Clark, “by the kind of mail people get—if they have the interest to subscribe to a magazine or two, if there are any picture postcards and hand-addressed letters from acquaintances who are keeping up in the world, or if they get too many bills stamped ATTENTION, if there are registered return receipt requesteds from some legal outfit. It’s a terrible thing, Clark, when a house starts to sink—when the man of the house is being dragged down.”
The boy heard a note of personal grief, of grievance. He asked, “Is that what happened to your father?”
“Yes. Yes, it did. I don’t like to remember it, if you don’t mind.”
“But then your daughter became rich and famous.”
“That helped. But she paid a price. There are no free rides. Look at the television bilge they have her in now. No better than soap operas, I don’t see how Em watches ’em day after day. She ought to retire on her money, your mother, but she can’t. That’s the penalty of success. Nobody knows when to stop. Everybody always wants more.”
He and Clark would get into the family Chrysler—a stately sober gray-blue, it was one of the few luxuries they had allowed Alma to buy them—and drive around Delaware, up to Wilmington, where he would point out the buildings that held the old movie theatres and O’Connell’s School of Practical Business, before the downtown was pretty much given over to the blacks. “Not their fault everything runs down,” he explained. “They don’t have the money for upkeep. They don’t have the money because they don’t have educations. They don’t have educations because nobody had any use for ’em, once they stopped being slaves. You know this was a slave state, right through the Civil War? They wouldn’t ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1901. Any black tried to vote, he was in big trouble. We had it all—lynchings, whippings. People are meaner than mules.” Clark’s grandfather laughed, as the Chrysler purred through blocks of tumbledown, boarded-up Wilmington. “Well, here’s the result. American cities are the black man’s revenge. They’ve taken them over. A white man’s scared to go into town, after dark. There used to be shops all through here, and pretty gals riding open trolley cars in their bonnets. Don’t think back then we didn’t look at the girls, and they didn’t know it, even though they didn’t show us everything they had on the first go.”
Nothing made his grandfather indignant. He was a man at peace, still curious about the world but with never any hope of changing it. Even the monstrous white-painted holding tanks, acres of them behind an eight-foot silver playground fence, down along the river where he and Jared used to fish, and where there used to be marshes full of heron and muskrat and terrapin, he found admirable in their way, as a triumph of expenditure and engineering, of Man’s ability to impose himself on Nature. They parked on the roadside and he rolled down the window, so they could smell the tanks, the rich and intricate chemistry of their processed petroleum. A sunlit shoal of cirrus clouds arching in the direction of New Jersey seemed to carry flakes of the tanks’ white paint up into the sky. Freon gases released in aerosol spray cans are destroying the ozone layer, scientists had announced that fall. Clark was fifteen, and at St. Andrew’s had been exposed to small doses of Machiavelli and Plato, Byron and Camus, even some Nietzsche—enough to know that there was less to the sky than he had once vaguely assumed. Every trip to the moon took something away from God. He was jealous of his mother; she had had a God, here under the cozy close sky of Basingstoke, and in her Hollywood egotism hadn’t bothered to pass Him on to him. He didn’t know what to believe; he only knew that he was going to die some day, and that was unthinkable—everything going out like a light bulb, and people and planets going on and on without him, even beyond the time when the sun exploded and became a cinder. He lay down at night into this charred and leaden eventuality; it belonged to the adult smells of his body as the sheets warmed, and masturbation’s headlong relief eclipsed the knowledge with a kind of inner light only to have it sourly wash back, even as he blindly dabbled at the sheet with his handkerchief, hoping the school laundry would mistake his ejaculation for snot. Lynette and Bobbi Anne and (most down and dirty) Alicia, eighth-grade girls he knew in his last year at Beverly Vista Elementary School, starred in the little movies he projected in his
head, but when they were over the bottomless black truth remained. In Hollywood there were these well-groomed churches and synagogues along the palm-lined boulevards but his mother had never led him into them, except for a crowded funeral or two, the death of a star, photographers snapping and excluded fans crowding the sidewalk and the tone inside that of a publicity handout or a roast with fewer than usual jokes. Who was this God everybody talked of but no one ever met? The Episcopal chapel services at St. Andrew’s seemed perfunctory and weightless, the same words every time, like a mumbled foreign language he had never learned, the homilies by faculty members chatty and down-to-earth if not, in tone, downright mocking. Where was the hidden miracle? Who could he talk to but his grandfather, who had mild, unblaming opinions on everything? He asked, one November day when they had gone to the beach in the car, and were happy to be back out of the wind in the Chrysler’s warmth, “What was Mom’s religion like when she was a girl?”
It could have been put better, but his grandfather grasped the gist. “She went to the Presbyterians over on North Elm, with her mother and mine. The Siffords had been Methodists, but it seemed easiest once the baby had come for Emily to switch, my mother was so keen for her own church. The family always said she should have been the parson, not Dad.”
“Was Mom, you know, real sincere?”
Teddy reflected back. “She never said one way or another, that I can remember. Went to church school every Sunday, and was confirmed at thirteen. Pretty as an angel, in a white dress my mother made with her poor old eyes. I didn’t go generally, but I went to that service all right. This was my girl.” He studied his grandson, his face looking worried, wondering what the boy wanted. “Then, about your age I guess, the age when she began to do with boys, her attendance began to slump off, and she’d stay home with me, doing her homework or going off and seeing some friends. It was normal, even Mother agreed. She’d say you expect to lose them at that age, they’ll return when they have children of their own. Mother had been head of Sunday school out in Missouri; that’s how Dad met her.”