A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [141]
“Is something wrong, daughter?” he asked.
She looked up at the high windows. Her eyes wandered about the vaulted ceiling. “Ay, Father,” she whispered. “I feel the Dread One about, I do. The Dread One’s close, very close about us here. I feel need of shriv’ness Father-and something else as well.”
“Something else, Mrs. Grales?”
She leaned close to whisper behind her hand. “I need be giving shriv’ness to Him, as well.”
The priest recoiled slightly. “To whom? I don’t understand.”
“Shriv’ness-to Him who made me as I am,” she whimpered. But then a slow smile spread her mouth. “I-I never forgave Him for it.”
“Forgive God? How can you-? He is just. He is Justice, He is Love. How can you say-?”
Her eyes pleaded with him. “Mayn’t an old tumater woman forgive Him just a little for His Justice? Afor I be asking His shriv’ness on me?”
Dom Zerchi swallowed a dry place. He glanced down at her bicephalous shadow on the floor It hinted at a terrible Justice-this shadow shape. He could not bring himself to reprove her for choosing the word forgive. In her simple world, it was conceivable to forgive justice as well as to forgive injustice, for Man to pardon God as well as for God in pardon Man. So be it, then, and bear with her, Lord, he thought, adjusting his stole.
She genuflected toward the altar before they entered the confessional, and the priest noticed that when she crossed herself, her hand touched Rachel’s forehead as well as her own. He brushed back the heavy curtain, slipped into his half of the booth, and whispered through the grille, “What do you seek, daughter?”
“Blessings, Father, for I have sinned-”
She spoke haltingly. He could not see her through the mesh that covered the grille. There was only the low and rhythmic whimper of a voice of Eve. The same, the same, everlastingly the same, and even a woman with two heads could not contrive new ways of courting evil, but could only pursue a mindless mimicry of the Original. Still feeling the shame of his own behavior with the girl and the officers and Cors, he found it hard to concentrate. Still, his hands shook as he listened. The rhythm of the words came dull and muffled through the grille, like the rhythm of distant hammering. Spikes driven through palms, piercing timber. As alter Christus he sensed the weight of each burden for a moment before it passed on to the One who bore them all. There was the business about her mate. There were the murky and secret things, things to be wrapped in dirty newspaper and buried by night. That he could only make sense of a little of it, seemed to make the horror worse.
“If you are trying to say that you are guilty of abortion,” he whispered, “I must tell you that the absolution is reserved to the bishop and I can’t-”
He paused. There was a distant roaring, and the faint snort-growl of missiles being fired from the range.
“The Dread One! The Dread One!” whined the old woman.
His scalp prickled: a sudden chill of unreasonable alarm.
“Quickly! An act of contrition!” he muttered. “Ten Aves, ten Pater Nosters for your penance. You’ll have to repeat the confession again later, but now an Act of Contrition.”
He beard her murmuring from the other side of the grille. Swiftly he breathed an absolution: “Te absolvat Dominus Jesus Christus; ego autem eius auctoritate te absolvo ab omni vinculo…Denique, si absolvi potes, ex peccatis tuis ego te absolve in Nomine Patris…”
Before he had finished, a light was shining through the thick curtain of the confessional door. The light grew brighter and brighter until the booth was full of bright noon. The curtain began to smoke.
“Wait, wait!” he hissed. “Wait till it dies.”
“wait wait wait till it dies,” echoed a strange soft voice from beyond the grille. It was not the voice of Mrs. Grales.
“Mrs. Grales? Mrs. Grales?”
She answered him in a thick-tongued, sleepy murmur.
“I never meant to… I never meant to… never love. Love…” It trailed away. It was not the same