The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (11 page)

A stirring sermon, everyone agreed; as they agreed that their minister was tired, and might do well to rest for the summer. He was undergoing a severe trial, and they gave him credit for that, as practicing Christians magnanimously sharing their sins approve the suffering of another.

Janet’s jaw dropped with concentration, —Listen. When the seed began to blow, ’Twas like a garden full of snow, I . . . didn’t . . . mean . . . Father? A safe-conduct from the Emperor Sigismund, but you see how they betrayed him? Keeping the road to Paradise littered with filth, to deceive good people. Limited atonement, total depravity, . . . wait. Unconditional election, limited atonement, total depravity, ah . . . ahhm . . . irresistibility of grace, I didn’t mean . . . Father? I . . . what was it? Listen . . .

—The power of God to guide me, Janet whispered, —the might of God . . .

—If you want proof, if you want proof, listen Father. That . . . and that wren, I didn’t mean . . . Father? Father? . . .

—The wisdom of God to teach me, the eye of God to watch over me, Janet went on, leaving the bedside to run down the stairs and pound on the study door, a thing she had never done, but this time she brought Reverend Gwyon bounding back up after her, to listen to his son’s broken disjointed confession of killing the wren that day, a confession which broke off and left the boy sitting bolt upright in the bed, his teeth chattering, blazing green eyes fixed on his father. Gwyon started to put a hand out, but withdrew it, saying, —A wren though, a wren? My boy, that . . . why, a wren, you know, the missionaries themselves, the early Christian missionaries used to have it hunted down, hunted down and killed, they . . . the wren was looked on as a king, and that . . . they couldn’t have that, . . . around Christmas . . . they couldn’t have that, he finished, withdrawing slowly, his voice trailing off as his son sank back on the bed, and Gwyon turned abruptly and hurried back
downstairs to his study, where he bolted the door and reached to a bookshelf for the works of Saint John of the Cross.

—The ear of God to hear me, the word of God to speak for me . . . Janet paused, at the bedside, to listen to the church bell ringing the hour. But like those on the pillow before her, her lips kept moving.

Hidden from people and the declining sun by the heavy green of the yew trees, Gwyon kept to his study. He was reaching back.

The longest day of the year was passed, and long past the annual Midsummer Day magic of bonfires to impel the sun on its suddenly flagging course, a measure despaired of, when religion took the reins, faith the ritual, and the day was turned over to Saint John Baptist who, in return for these same bonfires, rid cattle of sickness and banished the witches who caused it, raised splendid harvests, and even brought rain in Russia to the families of women who bathed on his day there (though faith had not quite won the day there: if drought continued, rain could certainly be brought by tossing into the nearest lake the corpse of a villager who had drunk himself to death). But in New England rain fell according to the caprice of a Divine who was to be propitiated only by making good use of it, and feast days, such as this Sunday, were best spent in the reverent complacency of sitting still. The outdoors was still light after suppertime, though Gwyon had refused supper from behind his study door, and Wyatt ate scarcely a bite before he lay back, whispering at the ceiling, leaving Janet contorted in prayer beside him. All day she had moved through the halls, on the stairs, to the kitchen in near silence, the only sounds to betray her to man the slavering lisps of her higher devotion which she exercised now: —The hand of God to protect me, the way of God to lie before me, the shield of God to shelter me, the host of God to defend me, Christ with me Christ before me Christ behind me Christ within me . . .

Birds ran on the empty lawns of the parsonage pecking at fallen irregular shapes of unripe crab apples. Swallows cut silent erratic courses above the carriage barn. The only clear sound was the sound of the sleighbells.

—Christ beneath me Christ above me Christ at my right Christ at my left Christ in breadth Christ in length Christ in height . . . Wyatt lay full length on his back, listening without hearing, staring without seeing at the familiar lines on the ceiling, a network of cracks which had formed an Arabian camel in childhood, since become Bactrian and grown a long tail. The windows were opened, and the whole house so silent that the warmth of day seemed even to have penetrated the dim corridors and set at rest the creaking
contention among those dark angles of woodwork. Thus the sound from the carriage barn came inside interrupted only by its own impatient pauses. It was these clinking splinters of sound which suddenly seemed to penetrate Janet, raise her from her bedside attitude and lift her away to her own room, where no one but she had entered bodily since she first entered it herself. Her door closed, closeting the stifled sound which escaped her as she sank to the floor.

It was almost an hour from dark. Gwyon stared at the branches arm’s length through the study window. From beyond those lacings of yew came the sound of the sleighbells, seeming more insistent with the approaching darkness. His arm rested as though lifeless on the Egyptian
Book of the Dead;
and he tapped the hard closed cover of the
Malleus Maleficarum
with his fingertip. Hardly moving in his chair, he took the flask from its cavity in the
Dark Night of the Soul
, and drank down half a tumblerful of schnapps. He placed the empty glass on the level surface of a volume of the
Index
, and said aloud, after a few minutes had passed so, —Make full proof of thy ministry. But the book open before him was not the Bible, nor the words Saint Paul’s.

“Close to the outskirts of every big village a number of stones may be noticed stuck into the ground, apparently without order or method. These are known by the name of
asong
, and on them is offered the sacrifice which the Asongtata demands. The sacrifice of a goat takes place, and a month later that of a
langur
(
Entellus
monkey) or a bamboo-rat is considered necessary. The animal chosen has a rope fastened round its neck and is led by two men, one on each side of it, to every house in the village. It is taken inside each house in turn, the assembled villagers, meanwhile, beating the walls from the outside, to frighten and drive out any evil spirits which may have taken up their residence within. The round of the village having been made in this manner, the monkey or rat is led to the outskirts of the village, killed by a blow of a
dao
, which disembowels it, and then crucified on bamboos set up in the ground. Round the crucified animal long, sharp bamboo stakes are placed, which form
chevaux de frise
round about it. These commemorate the days when such defences surrounded the villages on all sides to keep off human enemies, and they are now a symbol to ward off sickness and dangers to life from the wild animals of the forest. The
langur
required for the purpose is hunted down some days before, but should it be found impossible to catch one, a brown monkey may take its place; a hulock may not be used.”

He walked up the stairs slowly. Wyatt slept, the sheet covering him rose to points on the bony protrusions of his body. Only faintly aware of the trouble in his mind over the apparent extreme shortness of the boy’s legs, Gwyon suddenly brought this terrible
impression straight up into his consciousness and, doing so, realized that the points of the sheet were not Wyatt’s feet but his knees, so thin they stood up like feet. He moved quickly. He turned down the stairs, and walked from one room to another in the darkened parsonage, past the small butler’s pantry where Aunt May had stood weeping silently and alone that day her hawthorn tree had been found torn from the ground. He passed Olalla, her nose broken off a century before by a suppliant whose prayers had gone unheeded, her arm raised in her niche as though to stay him. For an instant fragments of his passing were reflected in the powerful clear mirrors of that cruz-con-espejos said to have been used by Sor Patrocinio, the Bleeding Nun, whose pullulating stigmata upset Spanish politics and the throne to such extent that she inclined to wear mittens. Gwyon glanced in at the low table in the dining room, mesa de los pecados mortales, —Cave, cave, Dominus videt. Abscondam faciem meam ab eis et considerabo novissima eorum, not reading those words but repeating under his breath, as though to give himself strength, words of that fourteenth-century translator of the Bible who died in bed, only to be dug up and burned, already rewarded for his labor of Divine Love with the revelation, —In this world God must serve the devil.

In the living room, he turned away from Camilla’s picture, where he had stopped, and took John H. down from the wall across. That portrait he put in a broom closet, muttering that the ancestor had probably got just what he deserved. All this time it seemed that Gwyon was putting off a decision which had already been made. He even stopped to cover a large mirror with a tablecloth. Finally he walked out to the back veranda of the house, and down onto the lawn.

Perhaps it was prospect of the white moon’s rising which had upset Heracles. The sleighbells sounded furiously, and then stopped, leaving an urgent silence. Gwyon was perspiring freely as he paced toward the arbor and back, in spite of the cool night air mounting around him. Then he stopped for a full minute to look toward the shadowed hulk of Mount Lamentation.

When he went in at the carriage-barn doors, Heracles stood still, quivering his long arms slightly, and then came up to his full height, waving a piece of bread. Gwyon took the leash from the wall, fastened it to the animal’s neck and together they walked up the lawn toward the house.

Afterwards Wyatt could not distinguish reality in these days, and the nights of the weeks just past. Deliria embraced in his memory, and refused to discriminate themselves from one another, from what had happened, and what might have happened. Memories
of pain were lost between waking and sleep, and but for the merciless stabbing in his feet that night, no longer identified themselves with definite parts of his body. Prolonged hours of wakefulness, when all he sought was sleep, might turn out to have been sleep when he waked: but most insupportable was the sensational affair which went something like this: consciousness, it seemed, was a succession of separate particles, being carried along on the surface of the deep and steady unconscious flow of life, of time itself, and in fainting, the particles of consciousness simply stopped, and the rest flowed on, until they were restored: but this was the stoppage, the entire disappearance of that deeper flow which left the particles of consciousness suspended, piling up, ready any instant to shatter with nothing to support them. Still, at such times everything was in order, of shape and color to mass and distance, of minutes accomplishing hours by accumulation just as the clock itself stayed on the table where it was if only because it had been accumulating there for so long: that was the reassurance of weight. But had a voice, even his own, quoted, —“With regard to Saint Joseph of Copertino Rapture was accompanied by Levitation”? The grating cry of Janet rang in his ears still: had he chased her down the brick wall of someone’s garden, where she turned on him transformed into a black man, and escaped? Had his father come in with Heracles, shaken him in his bed and pounded the walls saying words he could not understand, and turned to drive the animal out before him and down the stairs? And then a faint cry from the carriage barn below: had he leapt from his bed toward the pale casement of the window, forgetting that he had been so long off his feet that they were useless, their function totally forgotten, so that he fell screaming at the pain in them? For he woke on the floor with his father beside him, holding him up by the shoulders, his father whom he did not recognize, wild-eyed in that dim light. Then he broke open sobbing at the memory of the pain which had just torn up through his body. —In my feet, he cried, —it was like nails being driven up through my feet, as he was laid back on the bed blood-spotted at the shoulders, by this shaking man who could hardly walk from the room.

A few days later, Wyatt began to recover. He regained the weight of his body by meticulous ounces. That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.

The Town Carpenter came to call, and stood looking round the room at the wallpaper. The convalescent’s bed had been moved to the sewing room, since its windows faced east and south and those of his own smaller room to north and west, away from the sun.
Her sewing cabinet, with its long drawer still full of a thousand buttons, stood to one side of a window, and over it a shelf with a few books she had never opened since leaving school. There was nothing else of Camilla in the room, though here it was she had come at the moment of death, seeking something. —What was it? he whispered sometimes, looking up and around as though he expected her again, though her presence had always been one silent and expectant, often even while she was in the room it had seemed empty.

Camilla had chosen the wallpaper. It was pink, with beaded bands of light blue running to the ceiling and rows of roses between them. Her father had papered the room, and behaved very professionally about it though his pleasure showed through at the privilege of doing it for them: showed through so well that he had got the paper on upside down. And only now, as he lay on his back and followed its lines up the wall, did Wyatt realize that the roses were roses, not the pink dogs’ faces with green hats he had taken them for as a child, and never questioned since. When she stepped into the room that first time, Camilla could not see what had gone wrong. Then she did; but there stood her father with a smile of pride beside her, and she threw her arms over his crooked shoulders and thanked him, and never told him. It was the way things had of working out for her from the start.

—It looks fine, it still looks fine, the Town Carpenter said now, backing into a chair stacked with paintings and sketches and knocking the whole thing over, which immediately put him at his ease by giving him something to do. He admired each piece separately as he picked them up. —The detail! The detail! he said over and over, of these souvenirs of Wyatt’s illness by now become permanent fixtures in his life. Of these fragments of intricate work most were copies. Only those which were copies were finished. The original works left off at that moment where the pattern is conceived but not executed, the forms known to the author but their place daunted, still unfound in the dignity of the design.