• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 348 0

resistant to several centuries of his predecessors-marveled, because of the saint’s most peculiar smile. That little grin will ruin you someday, he warned the image…Surely, the saints must laugh in Heaven; the Psalmist says that God Himself shall chortle, but Abbot Malmeddy must have disapproved-God rest his soul. That solemn ass. How did you get by him, I wonder? You’re not sanctimonious enough for some. That smile-Who do I know that grins that way? I like it, but…Someday, another grim dog will sit in this chair. Cave canem. He’ll replace you with a plaster Leibowitz. Long-suffering. One who doesn’t look crosseyed at flies. Then you’ll be eaten by termites down in the storage room. To survive the Church’s slow sifting of the arts, you have to have a surface that can please a righteous simpleton; and yet you need a depth beneath that surface to please a discerning sage. The sifting is slow, but it gets a turn of the sifter-handle now and then-when some new prelate inspects his episcopal chambers and mutters, “Some of this garbage has got to go.” The sifter was usually full of dulcet pap. When the old pap was ground out, fresh pap was added. But what was not ground out was gold, and it lasted. If a church endured five centuries of priestly bad taste, occasional good taste had, by then, usually stripped away most of the transient tripe, had made it a place of majesty that overawed the would-be prettifiers.

The abbot fanned himself with a fan of buzzard feathers, but the breeze was not cooling. The air from the window was like an oven’s breath off the scorched desert, adding to the discomfort caused him by whatever devil or ruthless angel was fiddling around with his belly. It was the kind of heat that hints of lurking danger from sun-crazed rattlers and brooding thunderstorms over the mountains, or rabid dogs and tempers made vicious by the scorch. It made the cramping worse.

“Please?” he murmured aloud to the saint, meaning a nonverbal prayer for cooler weather, sharper wits, and more insight into his vague sense of something wrong. Maybe it’s that cheese that does it, he thought. Gummy stuff this season, and green. I could dispense myself-and take a more digestible diet.

But no, there we go again. Face it, Paulo: it’s not the food for the belly that does it; it’s the food for the brain. Something up there is not digesting.

“But what?”

The wooden saint gave him no ready answer. Pap. Sifting out chaff. Sometimes his mind worked in snatches. It was better to let it work that way when the cramps came and the world weighed heavily upon him. What did the world weigh? It weighs, but is not weighed. Sometimes its scales are crooked. It weighs life and labor in the balance against silver and gold. That’ll never balance. But fast and ruthless, it keeps on weighing. It spills a lot of life that way, and some times a little gold. And blindfolded, a king comes riding across the desert, with a set of crooked scales, a pair of loaded dice..And upon the flags emblazoned-Vexilla regis…

“No!” the abbot grunted, suppressing the vision.

But of course! the saint’s wooden smile seemed to insist.

Dom Paulo averted his eyes from the image with a slight shudder. Sometimes he felt that the saint was laughing at him. Do they laugh at us in Heaven? he wondered. Saint Maisie of York herself-remember her, old man-she died of a laughing fit. That’s different. She died laughing at herself.

No, that’s at s not so different either. Ulp! The silent belch again. Tuesday’s Saint Maisie’s feast day, forsooth. Choir laughs reverently at the Alleluia of her Mass. “Alleluia ha ha! Alleluia ho ho!”

“Sancta Maisie, interride pro me.”

And the king was coming to weigh books in the basement with his pair of crooked scales. How “crooked,” Paulo? And what makes you think the Memorabilia is completely free of pap? Even the gifted and Venerable Boedullus once remarked scornfully that about half of it should be called the Inscrutabilia. Treasured fragments of a dead civilization there were indeed-but how much of it has been reduced to gibberish, embellished with