Love and Sleep (8 page)
"Nos'ster."
"God helps those who help themselves."
"Yes'ster."
It was easy enough for Sister to assume her unchallengeable ascendancy over the younger children. Pierce at yellow-brick St. Simon Cyrenean in Brooklyn (separate doors for Boys and Girls) and the Oliphants in a new long low concrete-block and plate-glass St. Longinus on Long Island had learned unbreakable habits of deference. They could make no objection, wronged as they felt themselves to be, when Sister Mary Philomel organized them into after-school work details, to clean the fishbowl her fat carp swam in, to cut out turkeys and shamrocks and lilies green and white to festoon her walls at the proper seasons, not even when she took it on herself to have them mop their bedroom floors and remake their beds, like prison trusties.
But Joe Boyd was a harder case. It was apparent he was too old for the miniature classroom and its cutouts and flashcards. As much as she could Sister Mary Philomel set Joe Boyd problems and readings to be done by himself in the cold but at least private windowed room beyond the kitchen. Though she was cautious with Joe Boyd, she wasn't afraid of him; she chose carefully the instances when she would try conclusions with him, and almost always she won, gracious if unbending in victory and including him in that teacher's “we” that cut him too deep for words: Are we ready to start on our assignment now?
He was one of those spirits Pierce would always marvel at, supposing them to be rare: those who grant no absolute authority to anyone, who assume that all proscriptions are
ad hoc
and negotiable and that those in power are mere men, more or less like themselves. Pierce might do all he could to avoid being subject to the power of others, of rule-makers and -enforcers, but he neither thought to question their right to enforce their own rules, nor supposed their rules were bendable. Joe Boyd always did.
"You don't have to do that,” he said to Bird, who was busy mulching and tidying a bare spot that Sister Mary Philomel had decided would be a flower garden in the spring. “Just because she says so."
"I don't mind."
"This isn't
her
place,” Joe Boyd said. “This isn't her property."
"I don't mind."
"Are you going to do everything she says? Would you jump in the river if she said?"
"That's dumb."
"
You're
dumb."
Their father, about to sit on the toilet of the bathroom beneath whose window the garden was being laid out, overheard this, and came out.
"Joe. Why are you pestering her?"
"I'm not.” He thrust his hands in his pockets defensively as Sam approached him.
"Huh? Why are you taunting her? She's doing something useful and beautiful, and you're doing nothing."
"I wasn't."
"You can just leave her alone. Go find something to do yourself. I can think of several things if you don't have any ideas."
He turned to go, putting his magazine under his arm; Joe Boyd went off, but as he did so he tossed a final sneer at Bird for her submission: Teacher's pet.
Sam heard him, and rounded on him.
Sam never hit his children, and almost never raised his voice to them: he had never needed to. Bird watched now in horror as he seized Joe Boyd by the collar with both hands and thrust him hard against the wall.
"Did you hear what I just said?"
His nose inches from Joe Boyd's face. “Did you hear me tell you to leave her alone? Why did you just turn right around and insult her?
Huh
?"
There was no answer, and Joe Boyd knew better than to make one: and yet even looking into Sam's furious face his gray eyes were unflinching, unafraid, alert to possibility. Bird, scandalized, dismayed to have been the occasion for this outrage, wouldn't forget his courage or his cool.
Pierce that afternoon was hiding in the attic with a book.
WEREWOLF: Men (more rarely women) who occasionally have the form of wolves are Werewolves. The greatest question concerning Werewolves, and one debated since the Middle Ages by learned writers and doctors, is whether Werewolves can actually change their forms, or only think they have changed them; whether, as a result of their nature or through the power of the DEVIL (q.v.), they are actually capable of transformation, or rather suffer from a delusion (Lycanthropy) in which they believe themselves to be so transformed, though they remain human. The psychological explanation came to predominate, though it explains far fewer recorded instances than the physiological.
Across one end of the cool dusty-gray attic Pierce had run a rope, and on the rope had hung four old drapes he had found there, flowered with maroon roses; behind them, lit by the pointed attic window, was the clubhouse of the Invisible College—not of the physical chapter, but of the other, the one that consisted of Pierce alone. Sometimes the adventures that the College undertook up here were told of in the regular nighttime meetings: sometimes not.
Augustine thought that what is transformed is the phantasticum, a sort of spectral double that goes out in a form able to be seen, while the sleeping person dreams its experiences. More than one Werewolf, however, has claimed that his wolf's pelt is a real part of him, only turned inward like a hairshirt (versipilis). One Werewolf who claimed that his hair was inside was so badly cut by the surgeons trying his claim that he died. That was not, seemingly, the “inside” of which he spoke.
Pierce shuddered, but not from cold. He put his finger on the page, and looked up, hearing voices calling to him from below: Joe Boyd, Warren. They would wait.
Werewolves were known to antiquity, of course, and appear both in literature and medical texts, where the condition is described as Morbus lupinus and is always understood as a delusion, as it would not later be. There are Werewolves all through the Dark Ages as well, but there is a sudden and distinct increase in reported sightings and depredations of Werewolves in the later 16th C. and the early 17th. In Burgundy, in Hungary, in Bohemia, in Moldavia, men and women are charged with being Werewolves, the deaths of domestic animals and children are blamed on them. Great wolf-hunts are licensed and organized; Werewolves are captured and sentenced to horrifying deaths. These are also the years in which WITCHES (q.v.) also are discovered everywhere, tried, tortured and burned in vast numbers. Bodin the encyclopAEdist believed the plague of witches was due to the operations of the overreaching magicians of his day, who irresponsibly let loose crowds of dAEmons that then seized upon and possessed the unwary.
Suddenly struck with the presence of that double letter, “AE", which he saw often in this book and in the pages of his missal, and nowhere else. Was a dAEmon a demon? What was the difference? Where was AEgypt?
We typically think of Werewolves as creatures of evil, despoilers of the herds and of the herders too, who are able to take on animal form as witches took on the forms of cats or mice. But there is evidence that the Werewolves may not, or may not always, have thought of themselves in that way. There took place in Jurgensburg in 1692 the trial of a certain Thiess, a man in his eighties, who confessed to being a Werewolf, and astonished his judges by claiming that his kind, so far from being witches, were the natural enemies of witches. The witches, he told them, are the despoilers; they seize the new-planted seed-grains and seedlings from the earth, they steal the ripening harvest, and carry them off to Hell. In the Ember Days of the year, the Werewolves gather at night to pursue and do battle with them, to rescue the grain, and the livestock too and other fruits of the earth which the witches have stolen, and return them safely to the fields. If they fail, if they delay their pursuit, they find the gates of Hell locked against them; and the harvest that year will fail, fish in the sea hide themselves away, the young stock die. Nor were the Livonian Werewolves singular: the Russian and the German Werewolves fought witches in the same way. Thiess was punished for witchcraft despite his story of the enmity of witches and Werewolves, a secret history within the history of witchcraft.
What if it were true. It could not be: but what if it were. Strange but true.
A sudden partisanship arose within Pierce's heart, a longing so deep and simple that he could not even be puzzled by it: a longing indistinguishable from grief, that the story ought to be true, and could not be.
He thought of their sufferings: To be one thing on the outside, another on the inside; to seem nothing and no one, to be despised and ignored, unseen, and yet to be somebody on whom the welfare of everybody depends, even though they don't know it.
Pierce thought, in those days, that his attraction to the wrong sides, to the losing armies in historical struggles, was a motion of his spirit to take the part of the underdog, a kind of noble motion, like Joe Boyd's attraction to the dove-gray Confederacy: but it wasn't. Often enough the losers he was drawn to weren't the underdogs at all (Pierce leaned to the Tory side of the American Revolution as well as to the South, though he knew as well as Joe Boyd did who had been right in both those quarrels and who wrong). It wasn't taking the underdog's side: it was simply a sneaking desire to reverse the sides, to experience the story as though it had a secret inner logic the opposite of its usual one, the goodguys now the others, bearing the other flag: it couldn't be true, but what if it was.
The game gave him an inexplicable satisfaction, the same he felt when he lay on his back in bed hanging his head downward over the bed's edge, and by an act of will convinced his eyes that the floor was a dark dusty ceiling over his head, and the ceiling a white floor, with lamps sprouting upward from it: and a house different but the same, empty of furniture, extending outward room upon room over the tall thresholds of the open doors.
He enlisted the Invisibles, recklessly, in the secret struggles he recounted to himself; they were themselves losers, from a no longer existent time, and could be imagined to be takers of the wrong, the doomed side, the side History would leave behind. Anyway (he thought) he couldn't ever really alter the outcomes by taking the sides he took, for the right side always had to win—according to all the histories Pierce had read or been made to study it always had, in the end—and so Pierce's secret allegiances were moot: but still, into these adventures the others were not invited.
And the battle of the angels: which side then?
That afternoon, as they did every Saturday, Joe Boyd and Pierce went together with Warren to the Bondieu theater to see the cowboy movie always shown: walking each with his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket, each corduroy collar turned up, Warren alone of them wearing guns. On the stretch of sidewalk before the theater the boys of the town milled, waiting to be let in, eyeing the Oliphant boys and Pierce. One or two no older than Pierce smoked cigarettes with casual assurance. Sam said smoking stunted your growth; it certainly seemed to have stunted these guys'.
The picture was ten years old, but they neither knew that nor cared; and after it came a cartoon, or a comedy as the Kentuckians called it, rapid rituals of destruction and revival; and then the familiar urgent music of the serial. The announcer's doomladen voice hurried through the events of ten weeks to the present moment while snatches of scenes flew by carried on the runaway music. How Gene found the deserted mineshaft leading to the underground empire; how he had gone down to struggle with the powerful subterraneans and their plans of conquest. He was left at the end of every episode in mortal danger, as good as dead in fact, only to be seen at the beginning of the next episode to have survived: the cliff over which he had been shoved had a projecting ledge to cling to that had not been there last week, the careening truck had missed him, he had leapt out of its path though it was clearly impossible that he could have: as though the drastic and the final softened, between one Saturday and the next, into something less final.
Not this time though. The X-ray bomb that Gene had deflected from the upper regions and his own innocent ranch had gone haywire, blown up Gene himself. “They can't get out of
that
one,” Joe Boyd last Saturday had said, with a certain satisfaction too: and they had not. Gene was still dead. The empress of the underworld looks down on him lifeless and still, the toes of his pointed boots turned up. But she is secretly his ally. She convinces her dark Vizier (Father Midnight, now in high-collared cape and cuffed gloves) that the secrets Gene knows must not be lost. Very well, Majesty: there are ways. By techniques of science which the upper regions will not learn for centuries, or have for as long forgotten, Gene is brought to life.
—
Hurry, oh hurry.
—Have patience, Majesty. Death is strong.
He stirs on the shimmering operating table, beneath the reviving lamps. From his mouth comes a gout of language in a voice not his.
—
What does he say?
—It is the language of the dead, Majesty. They often speak it on returning; but they soon forget.
"Oh good grief,” said Joe Boyd. “Oh lordy."
After they left the movie, Joe Boyd insisted they stop at the dark and odorous variety store where magazines and comics were sold; while Joe Boyd, jaws working over a wad of Bazooka, looked through the new issue of
Guns and Ammo,
Warren and Pierce mooched among the comics, never holding any one too long, the embittered and watchful storekeeper whom Joe Boyd alone of them did not fear could decide suddenly that it was soiled and thus sold.
The vengeful dead, rising from the rotten plush beds of their coffins, dragging their decaying cerements after them. You could tell the girl skeletons because their hair, white and fine, still clung to their yellow skulls. Did it really? Warren would not touch or even approach the horror ones, looking at the covers only with one eye shut and his face turned away.
Outside the store they parted. Pierce was to serve an early Mass next day, and ought (he thought) to take Communion too; when he served a later Mass he could be excused, a growing boy who needed his breakfast. And if he went to Communion, then he needed to go now to confession. Joe Boyd saluted him, grinning around his gum, and Warren followed his big brother toward home.