Lives of Girls and Women (15 page)

There was a board in front of each bench, to kneel on. Everybody slid forward, rustling open prayer books, and when the minister finished his part, everybody else began saying something back. I looked through the prayer book I had found on the shelf in front of me but I could not find the place, so I gave up and listened to what they were saying. Across the aisle from us, and one pew ahead, was a tall, bony old lady in a black velvet turban. She had not opened her prayer book, she did not need it. Kneeling erectly, lifting her chalky wolfish profile sky-ward—it reminded me of the profile of a Crusader's effigy, in the encyclopedia at home—she led all the other voices in the congregation, indeed dominated them so that they were no more than a fuzzy edge of hers, which was loud, damp, melodic, mournfully exultant.

… left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord.…

And further along this line, and the minister took it up in his fine, harmonizing though perhaps more restrained English voice, and this dialogue continued, steadily paced, rising and falling, always with confidence, with lively emotion safely contained in the most elegant channels of language, and coming together, finally, in perfect quiet and reconciliation.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

So here was what I had not known, but must always have suspected, existed, what all those Methodists and Congregationalists and Presbyterians had fearfully abolished—the theatrical in religion. From the very first I was strongly delighted. Many things pleased me—the kneeling down on the hard board, getting up and kneeling down again and bobbing the head at the altar at the mention of Jesus' name, the recitation of the Creed which I loved for its litany of strange splendid things in which to believe. I liked the idea of calling Jesus
Jesu
sometimes; it made Him sound more kingly and magical, like a wizard or an Indian god; I liked the IHS on the pulpit banner, rich ancient threadbare design. The poverty, smallness, shabbiness and bareness of the church pleased me, that smell of mould or mice, frail singing of the choir, isolation of the worshippers.
If they are here,
I felt,
then it is probably all true
. Ritual which in other circumstances might have seemed wholly artificial, lifeless, had here a kind of last ditch dignity. The richness of the words against the poverty of the place. If I could not quite get a scent of God then at least I could get the scent of His old times of power, real power, not what He enjoyed in the United Church today; I could remember His dim fabled hierarchy, His lovely mouldered calendar of feasts and saints. There they were in the prayer book, I opened on them by accident—saints' days. Did anybody keep them? Saints' days made me think of something so different from Jubilee—open mows and half-timbered farmhouses and the Angelus and candles, a procession of nuns in the snow, cloister walks, all quiet, a world of tapestry, secure in faith. Safety. If God could be discovered, or recalled, everything would be safe. Then you would see things that I saw—just the dull grain of wood in the floorboards, the windows of plain glass filled with thin branches and snowy sky—and the strange, anxious pain that just seeing things could create would be gone. It seemed plain to me that this was the only way the world could be borne,
the only way it could be borne
—if all those atoms, galaxies of atoms, were safe all
the time, whirling away in God's mind. How could people rest, how could they even go on breathing and existing, until they were sure of this? They did go on, so they must be sure.

How about my mother? Being my mother, she did not quite count. But even she, when cornered, would say yes, oh yes, there must be something—some
design
. But it was no use wasting time thinking about it, she warned, because we could never understand it anyway; there was quite enough to think about if we started trying to improve life in the here and now for a change; when we were dead we would find out about the rest of it, if there was any rest of it.

Not even she was prepared to say
Nothing,
and see herself and every stick and stone and feather in the world floating loose on that howling hopeless dark. No.

The idea of God did not connect for me with any idea of being good, which is perhaps odd, considering all about sins and wickedness that I did listen to. I believed in being saved by faith alone, by some great grab of the soul. But did I really,
did I really want it to happen to me?
Yes and no. I wanted it to happen, but I saw it would have to be a secret. How could I go on living with my Mother and Father and Fern Dogherty and my friend Naomi and everybody else in Jubilee, otherwise?

The minister spoke to me at the door in a breezy way.

“Nice to see the good-looking young ladies out this nippy morning.”

I shook his hand with difficulty. I had a stolen prayer book under my coat, held in place by my crooked arm.

“Couldn't see where you were in church,” Fern said. The Anglican service was shorter than ours, economizing on sermon, so I had had time to get back to the United Church steps to meet her when she came out.

“I was behind a post.”

My mother wanted to know what the sermon had been about.

“Peace,” said Fern. “And the United Nations. Et cetera, et cetera.”

“Peace,” said my mother enjoyably. “Well, is he for it or against it?”

“He's all in favour of the United Nations.”

“I guess God is too then. What a relief. Only a short time ago He and Mr. McLaughlin were all for the war. They are a changeable pair.”

Next week when I was with my mother in the Walker Store the tall old lady in the black turban walked by, and spoke to her, and I was afraid she would say she had seen me in the Anglican Church, but she did not.

My mother said to Fern Dogherty, “I saw old Mrs. Sherriff in the Walker Store today. She still has the same hat. It makes me think of an English bobbie's.”

“She comes in the Post Office all the time and creates a scene if her paper isn't there by three o'clock,” Fern said. “She's a tartar.”

Then from a conversation between Fern and my mother during which my mother tried unsuccessfully to send me out of the room— she would do this as a kind of formality, I think, for once she had told me to go she did not bother much about whether I went—I learned that Mrs. Sherriff had had bizarre troubles in her family which either resulted from, or had resulted in, a certain amount of eccentricity and craziness in herself. Her oldest son had died of drink, her second son was in and out of the Asylum (this was what the Mental Hospital was always called, in Jubilee) and her daughter had committed suicide, drowning herself in fact, in the Wawanash River. Her husband? He owned a dry-goods store and was a pillar of the community, said my mother drily. Maybe he had syphilis, suggested Fern, and passed it on, it attacks the brains in the second generation, they were all hypocrites, those old boys with the stiff collars. My mother said that Mrs. Sherriff for many years wore her dead daughter's clothes, around the house and to do the gardening in, until she got them worn out.

Another story: once the Red Front Grocery had forgotten to put a pound of butter in her order, and she had come after the grocery boy with a hatchet.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

Also that week I did a vulgar thing. I asked God to prove himself by answering a prayer. The prayer had to do with something called Household Science, which we had at school once a week, on Thursday afternoons. In Household Science we learned to knit and crochet and embroider and run a sewing machine, and everything we did was more impossible than the last thing; my hands would be
slimy with sweat and the Household Science room itself with its three ancient sewing machines and its cutting tables and battered dummies looked to me like an arena of torture. And so it was. Mrs. Forbes the teacher was a fat little woman with the painted face of a celluloid doll and with most girls she was jolly. But my stupidity, my stubby blundering hands crumpling up the grimy handkerchief I was supposed to be hemming, or the miserable crocheting, put her into a dancing rage.

“Look at the filthy work, filthy work! I've heard about you, you think you're so clever with your memory work (I was famous for memorizing poems fast) and here you take stitches any six-year-old would be ashamed of!”

Now she had me trying to learn to thread the sewing machine. And I could not learn. We were making aprons, with appliqued tulips. Some girls were already finishing the tulips or doing the hem and I had not even sewn the waistband on yet, because I could not get the sewing machine threaded and Mrs. Forbes said she was not going to show me again. It did not do any good when she showed me anyhow; her quick hands in front of me astonished and blinded and paralyzed me, with their close flashes of contempt.

So I prayed: please let me not have to thread the sewing machine on Thursday afternoon. I said this over several times in my head, quickly, seriously, unemotionally, as if trying out a spell. I did not use any special pleading or bargaining. I did not ask for anything extraordinary, like a fire in the Household Science room or Mrs. Forbes slipping on the street and breaking a leg; nothing but a little unspecific intervention.

Nothing happened. She had not forgotten about me. At the beginning of the class I was sent to the machine. I sat there trying to figure out where to put the thread—I did not have any hope of putting it in the right place but had to put it some place, to show her I was trying—and she came and stood behind me, breathing disgustedly; as usual my legs began to shake, and shook so badly I moved the pedal and the machine began to run, weakly, with no thread in it.

“All right, Del,” said Mrs. Forbes. I was surprised at her voice, which was not kind, certainly, but not angry, only worn out.

“I said all right. You can get up.”

She picked up the pieces of the apron, that I had desperately basted together, crumpled them up and threw them in the waste-basket.

“You cannot learn to sew,” she said, “any more than a person who is tone-deaf can learn to sing. I have tried and I am beaten. Come with me.”

She handed me a broom. “If you know how to sweep I want you to sweep this room and throw the scraps in the wastebasket, and be responsible for keeping the floor clean, and when you are not doing that you can sit at the table back here and—memorize poetry, for all I care.”

I was weak with relief and joy, in spite of public shame, which I was used to. I swept the floor conscientiously and then got my library book about Mary Queen of Scots and read, disgraced, but unburdened, alone at the back of the room. I thought at first that what had happened was plainly miraculous, an answer to my prayer. But presently I began to wonder; suppose I hadn't prayed, suppose it was going to happen anyway? I had no way of knowing; there was no control for my experiment. Minute by minute I turned more niggardly, ungrateful. How could I be sure? And surely too it was rather petty, rather obvious of God to concern Himself so quickly with such a trivial request? It was almost as if He were showing off. I wanted Him to move in a more mysterious way.

I wanted to tell somebody but I could not tell Naomi. I had asked her if she believed in God and she had said promptly and scornfully, “Well of course I do, I'm not like your old lady. Do you think I want to go to Hell?” I never discussed it with her again.

I picked on my brother Owen to tell. He was three years younger than I was. At one time he had been impressionable and trusting. Once out on the farm we had a shelter of old boards, that we played house in, and he sat on the end of a board and I served him mountain ash berries, telling him they were his cornflakes. He ate them all. While he was still eating it occurred to me they might be poisonous, but I did not tell him, for reasons of my own prestige and the importance of the game, and afterwards I prudently decided not to tell
anyone else. Now he had learned to skate, and went to hockey practice, and leaned over the bannisters and spat on my head, an ordinary boy.

But there were angles, still, from which he looked frail and young, pursuits of his that seemed to me lost and hopeless. He entered contests. This was my mother's nature showing in him, her boundless readiness to take up the challenges and promises of the outside world. He believed in prizes; telescopes he could see the craters of the moon through, magicians' kits with which he could make things disappear, chemistry sets that would enable him to manufacture explosives. He would have been an alchemist, if he had known about it. However, he was not religious.

He sat on the floor of his room cutting out tiny cardboard figures of hockey players, which he would then arrange in teams, and play games with; such godlike games he played with trembling absorption, and then seemed to me to inhabit a world so far from my own (the real one), a world so irrelevant, heartbreakingly flimsy in its deceptions.

I sat on the bed behind him.

“Owen.”

He didn't answer; when he was playing his games he never wanted anyone around.

“What do you think happens to someone when they die?”

“
I
don't know,” said Owen mutinously.

“Do you believe God keeps your soul alive? Do you know what your soul is? Do you believe in God?”

Owen turned his head and gave me a trapped look. He had nothing to hide, nothing to show but his pure-hearted indifference.

“You better believe in God,” I said. “Listen.” I told him about my prayer, and Household Science. He listened unhappily. The need I felt was not in him. It made me angry to discover this; he seemed dazed, defenceless but resilient, a hard rubber ball. He would listen, if I insisted, agree with me, if I insisted on that, but in his heart, I thought, he was not paying any attention. Stupidity.