The Recognitions (108 page)

Mithra. Should the evil thoughts of the earthly man be a hundred times worse, they would not rise so high as the good thoughts of the heavenly Mithra. —Look out, be quiet . . . come on now, Reverend . . . —Should the evil words of the earthly man be a hundred times worse, they would not rise so high as the good words of the heavenly Mithra. —That's enough of this . . . get hold of him, shut him up ... —Should the evil deeds of the earthly man be a hundred times worse, they would not rise so high as the good deeds of the heavenly Mithra. The shaft of sunlight struck the gold bull figure showing a hand grasping the horns, again and again, to be interrupted above by a visage which broke it and eyes blazing with the suddenness of lightning, as the voice at each flash became thunderous, and they struck at the same moment, —To Mithra of the wide pastures, of the thousand ears, of the myriad eyes . . . —Look out! Get his arms . . . —the Yazad of the spoken name ... There was a crash, and a howl of pain. —be sacrifice, homage, propitiation, and praise . . . Someone finally managed to wrench a board from one of the windows. With the light, everyone looked in different directions. The howl of pain had come from a man now on the floor, and pinned there under the weight of the holy water stoup, drenched, having knocked it over in assailing the altar where it stood. The bell started again, and someone managed to turn off the mechanism. Someone else reached a telephone, and called a minister in a nearby town, inviting, and then entreating, him to come and restore the occasion they had gathered to observe. Everyone looked in different directions; and afterward, outside, none of them could say for certain how the figure exhorting them had appeared, though two starry-eyed children turned nasty with one another over it, one describing Persian dress, and a turban, the other Assyrian, with a crown, becoming so vivid, indeed, that their schoolteacher, who was quivering nearby, confirmed that they had seen such pictures in a history primer the week before, though this did not deter their zeal for a moment. One person said he'd been taken to hospital; another, back to the parsonage. The brisk air was turning cold; and in the shelter of a clapboard buttress, where they'd already retired from the sun before the sky itself commenced to darken overhead, this rising chill embraced a small knot of ladies, uniting them so familiarly that they might have been the immediate source of it, and their voices the shocks of its emanation. —At our supper last night we never suspected . . . —Never imagined such desecration was taking place right over our heads ... —I heard hammering . . . —Well 7 heard hammering. —I heard it too, but I never dreamt that something like this . . . —Something like this! . . . —I've had the feeling something like this was going to happen for quite a time now. —Since the last time he went away for a rest. When we all agreed that a rest would be best. —Ever since May ... —Since May? —I've thought . . . —Oh May. —That was his last really Christian service. May's funeral service. —How we have missed her. —How we have needed her. —How he has needed her guiding hand. —May would be eighty-three this month. —Someone ought to be notified. Someone ought to come immediately. Someone ought . . . —The son . . . —The son? —The son has been gone for such a long time. A prodigal son. —But he had no brothers. Poor Camilla . . . —Poor Camilla never was strong. Taken and left in foreign lands. —He wasn't a strong boy. When he took sick . . . —The Lord did spare him. —The Lord did spare him to do His work. To follow right in his father's footsteps. That is, of course . . . —His fathers six generations back. —To serve right here in his own community. The people he needs, who need him now. —Now I shouldn't repeat this, but I heard . . . —Do you know ... —I heard . . . —Do you know what I thought, as I remembered, after that illness that lasted so long, the Lord didn't spare him. As I remembered . . , —But I was certain ... 706

—Well it's true, the past plays tricks when all we have to depend upon is mortal memory. —Wait! Don't you smell something? —I did in there, I smelled something burning. —The terrible sweet smell of something burning. Their words rose on bursts of wind, were fouled in the buttressed eddies, and sunk by metallic cries of nails being wrenched from wood inside, where they went themselves a moment later, for it had suddenly begun to snow. The wind was still gentle enough, and the snow fell lightly; but through it, on the highway, gripping the steering wheel over which he could just see, a young man whose expression did something to redeem the otherwise vapid character of his face peered ahead between knuckles gone white with purpose, as he sped to answer the summons. His only sounds were bleating attempts to control his cold, now in its second, and most watery, day. The storm, as he would call it later, and as, later, it did indeed become, had blown up just as he left the town some ten miles off; and as though it had arisen as a challenge and a dare to his duty, he sped into the white flakes, making of their mild falling a threat worthy of his goal. He did in fact almost come to grief as he entered the town, where the arrow pointing to left warned of the imminent curve to the right. From time to time he had taken one hand from the wheel, to draw across his nose, which is just what he was doing at that moment, and for uncountable terrifying instants he wove between the Civil War monument and the Depot Tavern, as though choosing which to demolish, an experience which the most worthy of goals could scarcely redeem, and explains why he had to be helped from his car upon arrival at the church. Things had been set to rights as far as was possible, the pulpit replaced, the damaged pews straightened out, and the windows un-boarded, largely through the efforts of the burly man and his buddies. He stood now to the back of the unsteady gasping congregation, looking quite indignantly about him, and above, from an eye already greatly swollen and discolored. There were others as severely marked, better than a half-dozen of them, and he turned to one now, whose shirt hung in tatters under his torn jacket, to mutter, —We got him there all right, the doc gave him a sedative, put him right out like a light. Then he turned respectfully to the fore, wait-ing for the conscript in the pulpit to begin. The young minister started twice, but the sounds he made could barely be heard above, or distinguished from, the gasps and chirps in the congregation. And the reason for this ferment was that they were, one by one, turning their eyes above them. Although little light came in through the lozenge-shaped panes even now, uncovered, because of the sudden change in the weather, and the electric lights were, like the organ, found to have been put out of order, it was still quite easy to see the figures of stars, planets, the moon in various phases, and a resplendent sun, among other lavish celestial bodies, painted broadcast over the inside of the roof. Gradually the sound from the pulpit disentangled itself from those rising before it, climbing earnestly from one line to the next of what turned out to be part of the second chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Luke. Alter that reassuring narrative, the place was quiet but for the sounds of his own sincere pleading, as he went on to Saint John, and that vernal episode involving Lazarus, which he seemed to think might not come amiss. Apparently he was right. They seemed more grateful for resurrection than they had needful of the stable birth; and as his own voice broke and mounted between gasps, and his eyes watered in what, from almost anywhere in that light, appeared an overpowering emotion of belief, many lips on the upturned faces joined his importunate plea, —I am the Resurrection, and the Life . . . It was a simple service. He hoped by now to do little more than read a psalm, solicit a hymn, a cappella, and during that exercise recover enough voice himself to get through benediction; but he had hardly launched Psalm Number 89, —Till I thy foes thy footstool make . . . when there was a resounding crash which, though apparently some distance off, in the direction of the railway station, lost none of its impact on this convalescent throng. With great presence of mind, he called for Rock of Ages, and with equal fortitude led two stanzas of it himself, so that the benediction, when it came, was accepted as a minute of silent prayer by all but a few who could see his lips, and every bit of his face, straining over it, until, with the lowering of his unsteady hand, it was all over, and no one there ever saw him again. He left that town the way he had come, though more slowly, and more slowly still as he approached the built-up end of the curve which had almost saved him from the experience he had just been through, in the same manner that someone else, a complete stranger as the barbarian license tag showed, had just been delivered from the cares of this world to the chimera of the next. The Depot Tavern was ablaze; and the car radio, which was well inside with the whole front end of it, was playing the rondo from Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, to the silent passenger, and the twelve-point buck, knocked slightly askew up there as though he had cocked his head, listening, and in spite of the red Christmas tree 708

light dangling at the end of his nose, watching with a dusty eyeball and an air of imperturbable serenity. The real storm came, shrouding Mount Lamentation and then obliterating it altogether. The wind blew with a peculiarly terrible quality, broke here and there in the town a few windows, vindictive, viciously fingered where there was anything to destroy. It swept over the empty carriage barn, and cracked a blotched pane of that window tucked high on the house where Janet had been found, blue and rough-faced, weeping, and slavering —never never never never never . . . see him . . . more . . . , which some coarse unimaginative mind later publicly interpreted as a reference to a figure he'd known only as the sexton, found then in answer to the whine of a dog from behind a locked door, in bed, clutching a piece of paper, as the coroner, displacing the top button of the underwear for a token touch of his stethoscope against that empty chest, said he had probably lain for a day or two. (Downstairs, in the defaced study, the coroner even got to his knees on the floor beside the carcass flung there at full length, to note and comment on the single fatal wound in the bull's neck, inflicted while it lived, as one could see from the round and gaping nature instead of its being drawn in a slit, as such a wound would have been otherwise.) And the darkness came in like a substance driven on the wind which filled every crevice with it, and still did not relent where it failed in destruction, wailing round corners and shrill in the timbers erected awry but steady there at the foot of the hill. As for that platform, it would take three men as many days to dismantle it; but, although a number of curious things were to turn up around the place within the next few months, no one ever came upon anything that might have been a balloon. A number of curious things turned up during the first few months of the new minister's tenancy, though that barely lasted the spring. He did "dig right in" (that was one of his expressions) to ,ry to make the place "cheery" (another) and even "cozy" (. . .), choosing, first off, a bright upstairs room for his study, where it was not until one day when he lay on his back on the floor exercising with dumbbells (that was one of the things he did) that he discovered the wall to be papered with roses, and all of them upside down. Heretofore the pattern had not disturbed him, for he'd never tried to make anything of it; but now! . . . He was on his feet immediately, and had that taken care of, repapered, that is, with something (as he said) of a more masculine character, a repetitious series of what for him represented fox hunting, not unlike the paper he had used in a darker downstairs room, after its floor had been sanded to remove the stains, and its walls and ceiling scraped of the brilliant colors with which they had been heavily painted, that and a half-dozen repairs to the walls where they looked to have been kicked in. From a small room at the end of the upstairs hall, he'd had removed a printing press, its jumble of type, and a bundle of printed matter of which he could not make head or tail; not that he needed the room for anything, but he saw no reason to have a printing press in it at the foot of the narrow bed. From a chest of drawers in another room, he had a quantity of empty bottles removed. Not that he needed the drawers. He took down some paintings, whose subject matter was neither cheery nor cozy, and stored them along with a damaged statue, whose presence was certainly neither of those things, in a closet w-here he had come upon a jumble of books and some pieces of dark wood each mounting a small broken mirror in the end, which he took to be the remains of a curious picture frame, though he did not consider trying to have it restored. At one point he opened a small closet and found in it oatmeal tins, nothing but empty square oatmeal tins stacked from floor to ceiling. Then there were the books. Dumped in another closet he found such titles as Malay Magic and Libellus de Terrificationibus Noc-turmsque Tumultibus in a cascading disarray, and forced the door closed on them again immediately. From a dim room presided over by a needlepoint NO CROSS NO CROWN (which he gave to the Use-Me Ladies) he rescued a few sober titles for his own shelves, where Baxter's Everlasting Rest and Fisher's Catechism lent an air of permanence, stacked against Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Andrew Jackson Davis's Penetralia was of course relegated as a curio, for "Dick" (as this young man encouraged people to call him, since his Christian name was Richard), had no interest in seeing the interior of objects. That, along with Buffon's Natural History, which actually sprang open in his hand when he took it down, and he found himself staring at a hand-tinted picture of an ape. There were even books in the room where he'd found the drawers full of bottles. He kept two volumes, Tissandier's Histoire des bal-lons, not that he was interested in balloons, or could have read them if he were, but they were bound in green, and matched the motif of the new wallpaper. As for the others, two volumes of Lew Wallace, and Jules Verne's Tour of the Moon, Round the World in Eighty Days, and Five Weeks in a Balloon, those he gave to the American Legion, with whom he was co-operating in the great nation-wide Spiritual Crusade which they were sponsoring. 710