A Garden of Earthly Delights (49 page)

She embraced him at last, stiffly. So that they need not see each other's face.

He understood her. For a long time he thought of what had happened to Robert continually, as if the
crack!
of the rifle were still reverberating, echoing in his skull. Then by degrees it began to fade. In the years that stretched out between his brother's death and his own, the memory was to return to him unpredictably, often in that twilit dimension between wakefulness and sleep, but sometimes in the presence of others. The
crack!
of the rifle and Robert's desperate struggle not to die, at Swan's feet.

“You don't need to touch that gun ever again.” Revere's hand was heavy on Swan's shoulder, Swan had to resist the impulse to shrug it off. He knew it hadn't been his gun but Robert's gun that had killed his brother, yet that made no difference. Revere himself had a repugnance for firearms now, and kept his rifles and shotguns locked away; he would allow no hunting on his property of many acres, not even by men whose fathers and grandfathers had hunted on the Revere property for decades. Robert's rifle, as well as Swan's, Revere locked away with the others. Clark and Jonathan no longer hunted, nor even fished. There was no talk of guns in Revere's presence at any time. “No more. No more. Enough.”

Revere had a habit of murmuring to himself even in the presence of others. Sometimes at meals he drifted off in the middle of a remark, and forgot completely that he was speaking. Clark and Jonathan were mostly silent in his company. Swan was uneasy, yet tried to speak whenever Revere addressed him, like an alert, dutiful son. They were aware of the way Revere fell to watching Clara with
his strange, heavy stare, with an air of possession that excluded any actual interest or even awareness of what Clara was saying.

On Sunday evenings, Revere began reading the Bible to them. He told them that his own father had done this, when Revere was a boy.

In the winters those evenings were long and uncomfortably warm, because Revere insisted upon his family sitting by the fire-place in the parlor. This was a massive fireplace made of stone that had been dug up on the property, great chunks of fieldstone in the interstices of which spiders dwelled, that species of spider that spins funnels and not cobwebs, like cotton candy. Dreamily Swan watched these spiders dart about, frantic to escape from the fire. Revere favored birch fires, which required careful preparation and stoking at the outset; Clark usually volunteered. Often if wind descended the chimney sparks leapt out onto the rug and Clara had an excuse to jump up and rub a smoldering spot with her foot, muttering, “God!” under her breath. At such times Swan saw in his mother's eyes the trapped glistening look of a desperate creature.

Revere sat hunched by a hurricane lamp, glasses on his nose. He had resisted bifocal glasses for years. Now he read from the Bible in a halting yet authoritative voice, and the rest of the family sat and listened, or held their heads in an attitude of listening, until it was their turn to read.

Except Clara. Clara was “exempted.”

No one asked why. Swan supposed it was because Clara had refused, out of a dread of stumbling over words. And Revere would never force Clara to do anything against her will.

Swan, who was a good reader, always a bright, forceful student at school, did not mind the Bible evenings. He would far rather have read his own books but the Bible was an adventure book, of a kind. The Old Testament especially. Nothing made much sense in that long-ago time and things were yet to be decided and defined. At the outset of the Bible evenings, Swan had dared to ask Revere if there might have been dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, and Revere had stared at him for a long moment before saying, simply, and humbly, that he did not know. “If it was millions of years ago,” Swan said. “Before asteroids hit the Earth.” Revere nodded as if this remark
made perfect sense to him, and continued with his slow halting ponderous reading. The story of Moses and the Chosen People and the Promised Land. The story of plagues, and curses, and terrible punishments meted upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. When Revere read of the wrath of God the Father, his voice thickened; he seemed to be drawing strength out of the grotesque violence itself. Like one of Jonathan's comic books, it was. For there was a curious logic behind the wild illogic. There was good, and there was evil; there were the Chosen People, and there were their enemies. Swan listened dreamily as Revere read, seeing in his father's blunt graying head a shadow of God Himself.
Thou shalt have no other God but Jehovah.
He felt a gathering excitement in Revere's words, knowing that within a few lines the tale would end with death or reward, it hardly mattered which. Lurking over the land was the wide-winged spirit of God, restless and ever-vigilant; at any moment it might swoop down like a great bird of prey, and seize someone in its beak. Swan understood that he and Clara— yawning behind her hand, turning her loose-fitting wedding band around her finger—would be one of those seized by the throat if the world in which they lived now belonged to that God, which of course it did not.
God
was a word in a book, like many words in many books.

Swan knew that the New Testament awaited them, as they made their plodding way through the sandy terrain of the Old, but he was in no hurry for the New Testament: the Gospels. When Jesus came along things were different. It wasn't a comic book exactly. If you were not saved it was your own fault. It was your own choice.

When they were alone Swan asked Clara, “Did you ever talk to God or see Him or anything?”

Clara laughed.

“How come
he
cares so much about it then?”

Revere was
he
to Clara and Swan now, as well as to Swan's brothers; an impersonal pronoun that remained impersonal. It was true that Revere spoke more of religion now, and his “church-going” was more serious. The boys were embarrassed to hear their father utter the word “God”—even “Jesus”—in the way he might be speaking
of weather or a neighbor's behavior. Clara simply shut her face up like a fist at such times and made no comment.

Swan asked, “But why do people take time to believe it?”

“They just do. They always have.”

“In other books, like the encyclopedia, or science books, nobody talks about God. Wouldn't they, if God was real?”

Clara laughed again, not an angry but a light laugh. The kind that made you want to laugh with her. “How the hell should I know?” She was turning catalogue pages, staring at glossy, colorful photographs. Much of Clara's shopping was mail order: she was never so happy as when the mailman drove up the lane to the house, with packages C.O.D. for “Mrs. Curt Revere.” She subscribed to women's magazines as well including fashion magazines, these she studied even more closely. Her hair was “styled” in a fashionable cut, a smooth pageboy that fell just below her ears, and her teeth were now “capped”—her smile wasn't just happy, but whitely gleaming like ivory, and triumphant.

“People have a right to their religion, I guess,” Clara said, turning a page. “He wants to believe Robert is in heaven, maybe.”

“How can Robert be in heaven?” Swan asked softly.

“Why not? Just as well him, as anybody else.”

“There's no ‘heaven' in the astronomy books. In the encyclopedia—”

“
He
thinks it's there. That's his right.”

Strange how young Clara looked, though Swan knew that she wasn't. Her new teeth—as she called them—made her look younger, and very pretty. If they were in Tintern, or another town where people could see Clara on the street, Swan noticed how they looked at her; not just men but women, too. Swan was in the sixth grade now and sometimes he thought that Clara could almost be one of the girls at the high school: those glowing-faced pretty girls everybody stared at, and envied, and admired. In another year Swan would be attending Tintern Junior-Senior Consolidated High School, with Jonathan—a newly built beige-brick building that looked like a factory except its smokestack wasn't rimmed with flame. Seventh grade through twelfth. Swan could imagine Clara
laughing among those kids but he could never imagine Revere that young.

Swan persisted, “You don't think He's watching us?”

“Who's ‘He'?” Clara spoke vaguely, staring at a full-page photograph of a model wearing a long red cloth coat with a fur collar.

When Revere had Swan read from the Bible on Sunday evenings, Swan rarely thought of how crazy it all was. Once you began to read, you believed. And he read well, and he knew that Revere was pleased; and Clara was proud of him. And when Jonathan read, Jonathan stumbled and lost his way, and Revere asked him to begin again; sometimes Jonathan had to read a verse several times, before Revere allowed him to continue.

Quietly they sat by the fire—Clark, Clara, Swan—wishing that they were somewhere else. As Jonathan stammered on, his voice low and sullen. Sometimes Jonathan so forgot himself, he picked at his nose, and Revere chastised him.

“Stop that. Use a handkerchief.”

Clark, deeply embarrassed, sat with his elbows on his knees, in a pretense of piety and concentration. His forehead was slightly blemished. He was well over six feet tall, with muscled shoulders and upper arms and a hard, wide jaw; if Clark didn't shave every morning a dark stubble emerged on his jaws, giving him a furtive animal look. Yet he was handsome, manly; girls were attracted to him. Swan watched Clark closely when Clark read hoping to determine what Clark was thinking, but Clark read slowly and ponderously, and if he hesitated at a word he simply pronounced it as it struck him, and continued on. As soon as the Bible ordeal ended he was free to drive his car to “see a friend” and he'd come in late that night; Swan supposed he was thinking about that.

Strange how Jonathan blundered, in his reading. Only a few years ago Jonathan had sometimes read lessons aloud, and he'd read without making mistakes. Something must have happened to him: his eyes? The last book he'd read outside of school assignments was
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne; Swan had read it after Jonathan, and saw that only about half the pages were bent and soiled, which suggested that Jonathan had not finished the book. He was fifteen, and had some of the mannerisms of an adult
man, a habit of sidelong, suspicious glances and a tight pursing of his lips. When his turn at reading was over, Jonathan sat sullen and unmoving while someone else read; if he glanced up to see Swan watching him, his eyes brimmed with loathing.

Those were the Revere family's Sunday evenings.

The Reveres and their in-laws were numerous in the Eden Valley. Swan had many cousins—a dozen? fifteen?—but he was shy around most of them, and sensed their dislike of him. No one muttered
Bas-tid
in his wake any longer, not even Jonathan, yet he imagined he heard this contemptuous word, and smarted at its sound. Clara told him they were only just jealous of him—“Because you're smarter than they are, and better-looking, too.” Though Clara now disliked Judd, Swan had always liked his youngish uncle; and there were some others among the relatives he liked, or anyway did not dislike. He felt safest with adults because they mostly left him alone.

Among the adults, especially the men, Swan began to note that certain things were uttered in code. Remarks that had to do with the “property”—with “business.” There was a network of names and relationships and these had to do with people who lived in Hamilton and elsewhere. These individuals “in the city” were admired but not liked; when they were mentioned, it was likely to be with cynical smiles. Their world consisted of ownerships, not people. Unless there were cousins who were “engaged to be married” and their marriages were impressive, and worthy of comment. As Swan sat listening, shy-seeming, unobtrusive, unnaturally patient for a boy of his age, his need to be one of these Reveres and to share that name rose in him like a poisonous blossom.
I am a Revere, too! I am one of you.

After Robert's death, Swan was no longer teased by his young cousins. After Robert's death, these cousins mostly left him alone.

Except: there was Swan's cousin Deborah, Judd's daughter. She was two or three years younger than Swan yet she, too, often sat with the adults, with the women; like Swan, she read books, and she did crossword puzzles; but it did not seem so strange that a girl would do these things, especially since Deborah was considered
“sensitive”—“high-strung.” She seemed often to have a cold, or to be “just recovering” from the flu; her long crackling-fine fair-brown hair hung down lank about her small doll's face. She was pretty, though often her features were peevish, pinched. Swan became aware of his young cousin when she first demanded to know what he was reading, and when he showed her—a high school geometry text, that had belonged to Clark—she'd made a face and pushed it aside. Other books of Swan's had been more to her liking, and sometimes the two did crossword puzzles together. On her thin shoulders loose fair-brown hairs lay glittering.

Outside the window their Revere cousins ran, shouting. These children were wild and energetic as young dogs. Swan knew that Revere would have liked him to play with them—“play” was the adult term, uttered in innocence and ignorance—but he much preferred to be with Deborah. When he asked her, “Why don't you want to play with—” naming certain of their cousins, Deborah looked at him with faint incredulity that he would ask so stupid a question. “Because I don't want to.” At once she turned back to her book, or crossword puzzle; she would never explain herself, and seemed oblivious of Swan's presence. He had an impulse sometimes to tug at her hair, or pinch her pale, perfect little cheek.
Little princess
Clara said of Judd's daughter, meaning criticism, but also admiration. Swan wasn't sure if Deborah liked him or had no feeling for him at all. She was the most self-sufficient of children. Only once she'd said to him, unexpectedly, with a small, curious smile, “Something bad happened to—” (pausing, not recalling Robert's name) “—and you were there? Something bad, with a gun?”