Lives of Girls and Women (16 page)

I would often hector him like this from now on when I could get him alone.
Don't tell Mother,
I said. He was all I had to try my faith
out on; I had to have somebody. His deep lack of interest, the satisfaction he seemed to take in a world without God were what I really could not bear, and kept hammering at; also I felt that because he was younger, and had been in my power so long, he had an obligation to follow me; for him not to acknowledge it was a sign of insurrection.

In my room with the door shut I read from the Book of Common Prayer.

Sometimes walking along the street I would shut my eyes (the way Owen and I used to do, playing blind) and say to myself—frowning, praying—“God. God.
God
.” Then I would imagine for a few precarious seconds a dense bright cloud descending on Jubilee, wrapping itself around my skull. But my eyes flew open in alarm; I was not able to let that in, or me out. Also I was afraid of bumping into something, being seen, making a fool of myself.

Good Friday came. I was going out. My mother came into the hall and said, “What have you got your beret on for?”

It was time to take a stand. “I'm going to church.”

“There is no church.”

“I'm going to the Anglican Church. They have church on Good Friday.”

My mother had to sit down on the steps. She gave me as searching, pale, exasperated a look as she had examined me with a year before when she found a drawing Naomi and I had done in my scribbler, of a fat naked lady with balloonbreasts and a huge, inky, sprouting nest of pubic hair.

“Do you know what Good Friday is in memory of?”

“Crucifixion,” I said tersely.

“That's the day Christ died for our sins. That's what they tell us. Now. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Christ died for our sins,” said my mother, jumping up. In the hall mirror she peered aggressively at her own dim face. “Well well
well
. Redeemed by the blood. That is a lovely notion. You might as well take the Aztecs cutting out live hearts because they thought the sun wouldn't rise and set if they didn't. Christianity is no better. What do you think of a God that asks for blood? Blood blood
blood. Listen to their hymns, that's all they're ever about. What about a God who isn't satisfied until he has got somebody hanging on a cross for six hours, nine hours, whatever it was? If I was God I wouldn't be so bloodthirsty. Ordinary people wouldn't be so blood-thirsty. I don't count Hitler. At one time maybe they would be but not now. Do you know what I'm saying, do you know what I'm leading up to?”

“No,” I said honestly.

“God was made by man! Not the other way around! God was made by
man
. Man at a lower and bloodthirstier stage of his development than he is at now, we hope. Man made God in his own image. I've argued that with ministers. I'll argue it with anybody. I've never met anybody who could argue against it and make sense.”

“Can I go?”

“I'm not stopping you,” said my mother, though she had actually moved in front of the door. “Go and get your fill of it. You'll see I'm right. Maybe you take after my mother.” She looked hard in my face for traces of the religious fanatic. “If you do, I suppose its out of my hands.”

I was not discouraged by my mother's arguments, not so much as I would have been if they had come from someone else. Nevertheless, crossing town, I looked for proof of the opposite point of view. I took simple comfort from the fact that the stores were locked, the blinds down in all their windows. That proved something, didn't it? If I knocked on the doors of all the houses along my route and asked a question—
Did Christ die for our sins?
—the answer, no doubt startled and embarrassed, would be yes.

I realized that I did not care a great deal, myself, about Christ dying for our sins. I only wanted God. But if Christ dying for our sins was the avenue to God, I would work on it.

Good Friday was, unsuitably, a mild sunny sort of day, with icicles dripping and crashing, roofs steaming, little streams running down the streets. Sunlight poured through the ordinary glass windows of the church. I was late, because of my mother. The minister was already up in front. I slid into the back pew and the lady in the velvet turban, Mrs. Sherriff, gave me a white angry look; perhaps not angry,
just magnificently startled; it was as if I had sat down beside an eagle on its perch.

I was heartened to see her, though. I was glad to see them all—the six or eight or ten people, real people, who had put on their hats and left their houses and walked through the streets crossing rivulets of melted snow and presented themselves here; they would not do that without a reason.

I wanted to find a believer, a true believer, on whom I could rest my doubts. I wanted to watch and take heart from such a person, not talk to them. At first I had thought it might be Mrs. Sherriff, but she would not do; her craziness disqualified her. My believer must be luminously sane.

O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for thy Name's sake.

O Lord, arise, help us, and deliver us for thine honour.

Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.

I set myself to think of Christ's sufferings. I held my hands together in such a way that I could press a single fingernail with all possible force into each palm. I dug and twisted but could not even get blood; I felt abashed, knowing this did not make me a participant in suffering. God, if He had any taste, would despise such foolishness (but had He? Look at the things that saints had done, and got approval for). He would know what I was really thinking, and trying to beat down in my mind. It was:
were Christ's sufferings really that bad?

Were they that bad, when you knew, and He knew, and everybody knew, that He would rise up whole and bright and everlasting and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty from whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead? Many people—not all, perhaps, or even most people, but quite a few—would submit their flesh to similar pains if they could be sure of getting what He got, afterwards. Many had, in fact; saints and martyrs.

All right, but there was a difference. He was God; it was more of a comedown, more of a submission, for Him. Was He God, or God's earthly son only, at that time? I could not get it straight. Did He understand how the whole thing was being done on purpose, and it
would all be all right in the end, or was His Godness temporarily blacked out, so that He saw only this collapse?

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

After the long psalm with the prophecies in it about the raiment, and casting lots, the minister went up into the pulpit and said he would preach a short sermon on the last words of Christ on the cross. The very thing I had been thinking of. But it turned out there were more last words than the ones I knew about. He started off with
I thirst,
which showed, he said, that Christ suffered in body just as much as we would in the same situation, not a bit less, and He was not ashamed to admit it, and ask for help, and give the poor soldiers a chance of obtaining grace, with the sponge soaked in vinegar.
Woman, behold thy son … son, behold thy mother,
showed that his last or almost his last thoughts were for others, arranging for them to be a comfort to each other when He was gone (though never really gone). Even in the hour of His agony and passion He did not forget human relationships, how beautiful and important they were.
Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise
showed of course his continuing concern for the sinner, the wrongdoer cast out by society and hanging there on the companion cross.

O Lord who hatest nothing that thou hast made and … desirest not the death of a sinner but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live—

But why—I could not stop this thinking though I knew it could bring me no happiness—why should God hate anything that He had made? If He was going to hate it, why make it? And if He had made everything the way He wanted it then nothing was to blame for being the way it was, and this more or less threw out, didn't it, the whole idea of sin? So why should Christ have to die for our sins? The sermon was having a bad effect on me; it made me bewildered and argumentative. It even made me feel, though I could not admit it, a distaste for Christ Himself, because of the way His perfections were being continually pointed out.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Briefly, the minister said, oh very briefly, Jesus had lost touch with God. Yes, it had happened, even to Him. He had lost the connection, and then in the darkness He had cried out in despair. But this too was part of the plan, it was necessary. It was so we should know in our own blackest moments that our doubts, our misery had been shared by Christ Himself, and then, knowing this, our doubts would all the more quickly pass.

But why? Why should they all the more quickly pass? Suppose that was the last true cry of Christ, the last true thing ever heard of Him? We had to at least suppose that, didn't we? We had to consider it. Suppose He cried that, and died, and never did rise again, never did discover it was all God's difficult drama? There was suffering. Yes; think of Him suddenly realizing;
it was not true. None of it was true
. Pain of torn hands and feet was nothing to that. To look through the slats of the world, having come all that way, and say what He had said, and then see—nothing.
Talk about that!
I cried inwardly to the minister. Oh, talk about that, drag it into the open, and then—defeat it!

But we do what we can, and the minister could not do any more.

I met Mrs. Sherriff on the street a few days later. I was by myself this time.

“I know you. What are you doing all the time at the Anglican Church? I thought you were United.”

W
HEN MOST OF THE SNOW
had melted and the river had gone down, Owen and I went out the Flats Road, separately, on Saturdays, to the farm. The house, where Uncle Benny had been living all winter and my father had been living most of the time, except for those weekends when he came in to stay with us, was so dirty that it no longer had to be a house at all; it was like some sheltered extension of the out-of-doors. The pattern of the kitchen linoleum was lost; dirt itself made a pattern. Uncle Benny said to me, “Now here's the cleaning-lady, just the thing we need,” but I did not think so. The whole place smelled of fox. There would be no fire in the stove till evening and the door stood open. Outside were crows cawing over the muddy fields, the river high and silver, the pattern of the horizon exactly, magically the same as remembered and forgotten and remembered. The foxes
were nervous, yelping, because it was the time of year the females had their pups. Owen and I were not allowed to go near the pens.

Owen was swinging on the rope under the ash tree, where our swing had been last summer.

“Major killed a sheep!”

Major was our dog, now thought of as Owen's dog, though he did not pay any particular attention to Owen; Owen paid it to him. He was a big golden-brown mongrel collie, who had grown too lazy last summer even to chase cars, but napped in the shade; awake or asleep, he had a slow senatorial sort of dignity. And now he was chasing sheep; he had taken up criminality in his old age, just as a proud and hitherto careful old senator might publicly take up vice. Owen and I went to have a look at him, Owen telling on the way that the sheep belonged to the Potters, whose land adjoined ours, and that the Potter boys had seen Major, from their truck, and had stopped and jumped over fences and yelled but Major had separated his sheep from the others and kept right on after it and killed it.

Killed
it. I imagined it all bloody, torn apart, Major had never hunted or killed a thing in his life. “Did he want it to
eat
?” I asked in bewilderment and repugnance, and Owen was obliged to explain that the killing had been, in a way, incidental. It seemed that sheep could be run to death, frightened to death, they were so weak and fat and panicky; though Major had taken, as a trophy, a mouthful of warm wool from the neck, had pounced on that and worried it a bit, for form's sake. Then he had to streak for home (if he could streak, Major!) because the Potter boys were coming.

He was tied up inside the barn, the door open to give him some light and air. Owen jumped astride his back to wake him up—Major always woke so quickly and gravely, without fuss, that it was hard to know whether he was really asleep, or shamming—and then rolled over on the floor with him, trying to make him play. “Old sheep-killer, old sheep-killer,” said Owen, punching him proudly. Major put up with this, but was no more playful than usual; he did not seem to have regained his youth in any but the one astounding way. He licked the top of Owen's head in a patronizing manner, and settled down to sleep again when Owen let go.

“He has to be tied up so he won't go after sheep again, old sheep-killer. Potters said they'd shoot him if they ever caught him again.”

This was true. Major was indeed in the limelight. My father and Uncle Benny came to look at him, in his sham dignity and innocence on the barn floor. Uncle Benny saw him as doomed. In his opinion no dog who took up chasing sheep had any hope of getting over it. “Once he's got the taste,” Uncle Benny said, fondling Major's head, “he's got the taste. You can't let him live, a sheep-killer.”

“You mean shoot him?” I cried not exactly out of love for Major but because it seemed such a brutal ending to what everybody was considering a rather comic story. It was like leading the white-haired senator out to public execution for his embarrassing pranks.

“Can't keep a sheep-killer. He'd have you poor, paying for all the sheep he killed. Anyway somebody else'd put an end to him, if you didn't.”

My father, appealed to, said that perhaps Major would not chase any more sheep. He was tied up, anyway. He could stay tied up the rest of his life, if necessary, or at least until he got over his second childhood and became too feeble for chasing anything; that should not be too long now.