Lives of Girls and Women (16 page)

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.

But my father was wrong. Uncle Benny with his grinning pessimism, his mournful satisfied predictions, was right. Major broke out of captivity, during the early morning hours. The barn door was shut but he tore some wire netting from a window that had no glass in it, and jumped out, and raced to Potter’s to take up again his lately-discovered pleasures. He was home by breakfast, but the broken rope and window and the dead sheep in Potter’s pasture were there to tell the story.

We were at breakfast. My father had spent the night in town. Uncle Benny phoned him and told him, and my father when he came back to the table said, “Owen. We have to get rid of Major.”

Owen began to quiver but he did not say a word. My father in a few words told about the breakout and the dead sheep.

“Well he’s an old dog,” said my mother with false heartiness. “He’s an old dog and he’s had a good life and who knows what’s going to happen to him now anyway, all the diseases and miseries of old age.”

“He could come and live here,” said Owen weakly. “Then he wouldn’t know where a sheep was.”

“A dog like that can’t live in town. And no guarantee he wouldn’t get back at it anyway.”

“Think of him tied up in town, Owen,” said my mother reproachfully.

Owen got up and left the table without saying anything else. My mother did not call him back to say
Excuse me
.

I was used to things being killed. Uncle Benny went hunting, and trapping muskrats, and every fall my father killed foxes and sold the pelts for our livelihood. Throughout the year he killed old and crippled or simply useless horses for the foxes’ food. I had had two bad dreams about this, both some time ago, that I still remembered. Once I dreamed that I went down to my father’s meat house, a screened shed beyond the barn where in summer he kept parts of skinned and butchered horses hanging on hooks. The shed was in the shade of a crabapple tree; the screens would be black with flies. I dreamed that I looked inside and found, not unexpectedly, that what he really had hanging there were skinned and dismembered human bodies. The other dream owed something to English history, which I had been reading about in the encyclopedia. I dreamed my father had set up an ordinary, humble block of wood on the grass outside the kitchen door, and was lining us up—Owen and my mother and me—to cut off our heads.
It won’t hurt,
he told us, as if that was all we had to be afraid of,
it’ll all be over in a minute
. He was kind and calm, reasonable, tiredly persuasive, explaining that it was all somehow for our own good. Thoughts of escape struggled in my mind like birds caught in oil, their wings out, helpless. I was paralyzed by this reasonableness, the arrangements so simple and familiar and taken-for-granted, the reassuring face of insanity.

In the daytime I was not so frightened as these dreams would suggest. It never bothered me to go past the meat house, or to hear the gun go off. But when I thought of Major being shot, when I pictured my father loading the gun unhurriedly, ritualistically as he always did and calling Major who would not suspect anything, being used to men with guns, and the two of them walking past the barn, my father looking for a good spot—I did see again the outline of that reasonable, blasphemous face. It was the deliberateness I dwelt on, deliberate choice to send the bullet into the brain to stop the systems working—in this choice and act, no matter how necessary and reasonable, was the assent to anything. Death was made possible. And not because it could not be prevented but because it was what was wanted—
wanted,
by all those adults, and managers, and executioners, with their kind implacable faces.

And by me? I did not want it to happen, I did not want Major to be shot, but I was full of a tense excitement as well as regret. That scene of execution which I imagined, and which gave me such a flash of darkness—was that altogether unwelcome? No. I dwelt on Major’s trustfulness, his affection for my father—whom he did like, in his self-possessed way, as much as he could like anybody—his half-blind cheerful eyes. I went upstairs to see how Owen was taking it.