Dissident Gardens (47 page)

The whole rest of Pendle Acre School was then just junk and noise, needless to consider, at the center of which sat Murphy at his guitar, in the rooms of the half-basement apartment, where were shelved the books from which the reformed hippie read aloud without explanation, nodding his head significantly, breaking the silence with a question or by picking up his guitar again, meanwhile a bag of pretzels open and go ahead, help yourself. Murphy’s whole vibe, of abiding in voluntary sensory deprivation, was not unrelated to everyone’s whispered certainty that he’d gotten stoned a hundred times more than even the stonerest of the Led Zeppelin–jacketed dudes of the upper grades, no laughing matter actually how many brain cells he’d allowed to float off to the four winds. From this, Harris Murphy’s quiet authority derived. Murphy’s recovering from the sixties, from the world outside Pendle Acre’s walls, was akin to the eight-year-old’s getting over New York City and Tommy and Miriam, their lives as unfathomable as their deaths. It made a perfect fit.

Sergius would make himself, then, not only a guitar prodigy but the most prodigal Friend. The Quakerest kid, in a place where there was a fair degree of competition. Meeting on Sunday was optional—perhaps so the weekenders wouldn’t be encouraged to feel they’d gotten out of something—but dozens showed up to do, well,
something
in the silence, to feel a part of it, anyway not to scorn. Some kids even rose to give witness, speaking in testimony of the Light. Morning meeting before classes was compulsory, and therefore more rote—plenty of Pendle Acre kids used the time to scribble on homework pages, making up for what they’d neglected the night before. Each opportunity, morning or Sunday, Pendle Acre’s little orphan embarked into the Light with ferocious determination, and there was nobody in Quakerdom who’d ever have told him he was doing it wrong. By the logic of Quakerism, at least as it had presented itself to him, first at Fifteenth Street Sunday school, then in paraphrase by Harris Murphy, you
couldn’t
do it wrong.

Or maybe there was one way. Sergius, a month or so after his parents’ deaths, stumbled into a violation of the Advice of Moderation.
It happened because Murphy had given him a book—not a Quaker book, or not directly, except in that typical Quaker embrace of darker-skinned peoples and their indigenous traditions—
Day of the Dead: Mexican Myths and Folktales
. Perhaps compensating for a certain barrenness in Quaker conceptions of the afterlife, Murphy handed the sorry kid this thing full of jolly skeletons and benign ghosts, of zombie ancestors more often misunderstood than ill-intentioned. The animate corpses in the Mexican tales had a consolingly lumpen quality, stumbling through a droll dusty universe not much different from that of the peasants or shopkeepers they’d been before being put in the ground. Besides, the book seemed to Sergius to say,
Your parents vanished south of the border—they died in the Spanish tongue
. So the book might be intended to reveal to him where exactly they’d ended up.

For some weeks Sergius carried the book with him, the new
Ferdinand
. He’d seized on the tale of a certain Pedro, whose older brother died falling from a burro. This older brother had at his request been entombed with a sort of chimney or speaking tube that stuck out of the grave, in order to give report from the other side. And so Pedro had faithfully gone and on a daily basis communed through the tube with his dead brother, speaking with him of matters secular and prosaic: of earthworms, the crops, and the prospect for rainfall, and of the ironic fate of the burro from which the brother had tumbled—it had been sold into a war, one which the brother had avoided by dying, and which Pedro was now spared according to a local rule that no family should lose both its sons.

Three weeks in a row, Sergius brought the Mexican book to Sunday meeting and, after a certain interval of silence and a spontaneous message or two from a teacher or an older kid, stood and cleared his throat and read aloud the story of Pedro at the graveside.
See
, he intended the message to say,
it’s okay
. The dead are still around. And
I’m
okay. You don’t have to feel sorry for me.

The first afternoon after he’d offered the story into the silence they smothered him in congratulations. Reading from a book might not be the standard mode of inspired messaging, sure, but for an eight-year-old to give testimony at meeting at all, and more, one in his distinct situation: wow! Murphy took him aside, shook his hand, as Sergius
probably could have expected, but also teachers he barely knew, and the headmaster, and a couple of the older girls. It made Sergius a bit of a star, a sacred example of what a place like Pendle Acre was all about.

So the Sunday following, he read it again.

This time afterward not so many remarked, and not with such enthusiasm. Murphy just patted him on the back and suggested they work on some chord fingerings. But why demand congratulation? Sergius was proving himself no longer a sport or novelty but a routine dweller in the Light. Pedro’s tale seemed fully as profound the second time aloud as it had each of the dozens of times Sergius read it silently to himself. In fact, the meaning kept expanding.
Death is no big deal!
Let it sink in for all as it had for him.

When Sergius narrated it the third Sunday in a row, the headmaster gathered him up for a little stroll and some Friendly counsel about Moderation in All Things.

Later that afternoon Sergius visited Murphy’s rooms to return the Mexican book.

“It’s yours to keep, Sergius.”

“I don’t want it anymore.”

“You sure?”

Sergius threw the book against Murphy’s couch. It suddenly disgusted him. Not one kid had mocked him for speaking in meeting, as he knew they mocked one another each time one of them conformed to that mild expectation. Not one single kid had pointed out to Sergius how he was unable to speak to his parents through a tube in the earth as Pedro spoke with his brother. No one had censured him, not even the headmaster, and that was how Sergius could be certain he was pitied everywhere he walked. He was the Mexican book’s dupe, maybe Murphy’s as well.

“I want the ones who killed them to be dead, too.”

“I understand,” stalled Murphy.

“I want to kill them.”

Sergius spoke from behind a hot mask of tears, but just a mask: He only had to accept he wore it because he tasted snot. He felt that if he had a gun he’d fire it at Murphy, not least for instilling him with Quaker shame at his own violence. That the book had bounded
harmlessly into the cushions, that the men who’d murdered Tommy and Miriam were cloaked in inconceivable remoteness, that his killer’s soul was housed in the feeble container of an eight-year-old, none of these tempered his fury. They concentrated it.

Murphy, seeing what was before him, likely felt he had a test to pass.

“The Lamb’s War,” said Murphy.

“What’s that?”

“Here, sit down, let me read you something.” Murphy, as ever lightning-quick with the palliatives, had a plate of graham crackers and a glass of milk set up before Sergius knew it—could he have had them waiting? Murphy knew his place in the book he pulled from the shelf, too, as if he’d been preparing this reading for Sergius, figuring he’d need it. And the half basement’s shades were already drawn, so none of Murphy’s other pet students would be crouching down and rapping at his low windows.

“ 
‘God hath lost the creature out of his call and service, and the creature now uses the creation against the creator. Now, against this evil seed doth the lamb make war, to take vengeance of his enemies.’
That’s you, Sergius. The Lamb’s War—that’s what
you’re
fighting.”

“Is it … George Fox?” Sergius hadn’t heard Murphy use the word
evil
before. Or
vengeance
.

“Nope. This is another early Friend, a guy I haven’t mentioned before, James Nayler. Nayler started as a soldier, a feisty guy, and when he met Fox and started running around England speaking of the Light, they imprisoned him and put a hot poker through his tongue. But listen:
‘As the lamb wars not against men’s persons, so his weapons are not carnal, nor hurtful to any of the creation; for the lamb comes not to destroy men’s lives … his armor is the Light, his shield faith and patience … thus he goes out in judgment and righteousness, to make war with his enemies, not with whips and prisons, tortures and torments on the bodies of creatures, but with the word of truth, to pass judgment upon the head of the serpent, and covers his own with his love …’
 ”

As Murphy droned on and Sergius listened, as Sergius’s mask evaporated, caking and crackling on his cheeks and on his sleeve where
he’d sluiced it across his upper lip—and Murphy’d known not to demolish Sergius’s pride with the offer of a tissue—as Sergius salved his aching gut with a mud of molar-crushed grahams and milk, he came slowly to understand that Murphy was reading as much to himself as to his ward. It was obvious in Murphy’s readiness with the passages, the way he now could be seen skipping from one page to the next, stringing Nayler’s words to make his case, skipping over who-knew-what and Sergius didn’t care to find out. It didn’t matter, for what Sergius saw and understood was that the teacher hadn’t readied the book for his student so much as uncovered his own Lamb’s War to Sergius’s view. Murphy hadn’t fought his and won, either—he fought it still, fought it every day, that was the message. Murphy’s voice was hypnotic if you shut your eyes, and if you didn’t, and Sergius didn’t, you were hypnotized by the way his elegant tenor formed itself out from below that twisted scar no thickness of beard could conceal. The harelip was evidence enough of the teacher’s Lamb’s War, it was his serpent-scar, or perhaps a kind of serpent itself, embedded in his flesh. Here was where you encountered the Light: It struck anywhere, anytime. At that instant he and Murphy there in the basement comprised a meeting of two.

Then Murphy put Nayler’s book on the shelf, didn’t fool around with any offers to loan it out, and Sergius knew that it would be a long time before he spoke again in meeting and that whenever he finally did it wouldn’t be a passage read aloud from a book but a true message, like Nayler’s, a dire stark communiqué from some remote front of the Lamb’s War.

Then Murphy said, “Let’s play some guitar.”

At the start of June Pendle Acre thinned out, summer session consisting of just a scattering of kids. Mostly these were the high-school hippies who’d started the vegetable farm and didn’t want to see it die, so signed up for a French or German intensive with not much intention of acquiring a language, nor of even attending the summer classes. More than half the resident teachers hightailed it too, leaving a skeleton
crew—though not Murphy. It was three months from the date of his parents’ deaths, and a certain question had become unavoidable to the kid who’d been unaware even of any effort to avoid it.

“Am I going back to New York City?”

“Not unless you want to.” Murphy talked over chords, reminiscent of something—a Bob Dylan song?—if Sergius could pin it down. “To visit, I mean.”

“No, I mean, am I staying in school here next year?”

“You sure are.”

“How—”

“New York Yearly Meeting and Fifteenth Street have got you on a full scholarship, not that Pendle Acre would ever think twice about letting you stay if they hadn’t, Sergius. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

It wasn’t much like Murphy to interrupt. Nor to bear upon Sergius with little interrogatory feints, as he did now, the chords continuing all the while. “So do you
want
to visit New York City?”

“I don’t know—maybe.”

“If you did, who’d you want to visit?”

Sergius shrugged, sensing no right reply. On the tiny menu of names available, he couldn’t think which he ought to mention first.

“You remember Stella Kim?”

“Sure.” That had been one of the names.

“Well, listen, there’s something I wanted to tell you. Stella wants to see you, and next week we’re going to send you up to Philadelphia to see her.”

“Why not in New York City?”

“Maybe later, but there’s something we need you to do in Philadelphia, and Stella’s going to be there and help you with it. We need you to talk to a judge, just for a few minutes, and that’ll help make it simpler for you to stay here with us, okay? You only have to do it once.”

Murphy’s
we
and
us
worked like a clamp on Sergius’s hundred questions. Sergius managed to voice one. “Are you coming?”

“I’d like to, Sergius, I really would. The headmaster’s going to take you up there, and I’ll be waiting here for you when you’re done.”

“Okay.”

“All you have to do is say you want to come back here.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to believe me on this one thing, Sergius, and that’s that
I’m not going anywhere
, all right?”

“Okay.” It would take Sergius years to sort it out, that what was so reassuring about Harris Murphy was also what was sort of horrible: You too-completely believed him when he said he presented no risk of budging from the postage-stamp universe of Pendle Acre.