A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [14]
“Let’s sit near the back.”
“Oh, okay, if you like,” Calla is disappointed, but willing to make any concessions because she’s actually got me here. We push our way past feet, past coats containing people whose faces can’t be seen because their heads are bowed. Then we’re sitting in the middle of the row, and although I would have preferred the end, I can’t move now.
I can’t move, that’s the awful thing. I’m hemmed in, caught. On one side of me sits Calla, bunched up in her gabardine trenchcoat, and on the other side an unknown man, middle-aged, or so I’d guess from his balding head. He is leaning forward, head down, his large-knuckled hands clenched on his knees. He is a farmer, I think, for the back of his neck is that brick red that gets ingrained from years of sun and never fades, not even in the winter.
I must focus my mind on something, and not think of this meeting hall and everything around me. I must go away, pretend it isn’t. When I first came back to Manawaka, Lennox Cates used to ask me out, and I went, but when he started asking me out twice a week, I stopped seeing him before it went any further. We didn’t have enough in common, I thought, meaning I couldn’t visualize myself as the wife of a farmer, a man who’d never even finished High School. He married not long afterwards. I’ve taught three of his children. All nice-looking kids, fair-haired like Lennox, and all bright. Well.
The two ceiling bulbs are bare, and can’t be more than forty watts. The light seems distant and hazy, and the air colder than it can really be, and foetid with the smell of feet and damp coats. It’s like some crypt, dead air and staleness, deadness, silence. The scuffing of incoming shoes has stopped. They are all assembled now. Perhaps they are praying.
How can Calla sit there, head inclined? How can she come here every week? She is slangy and strident; she laughs a lot, and in her flat she sings with hoarse-voiced enjoyment the kind of songs the teenagers sing. She can paint scenery for a play or form a choir out of kids who can’t even carry a tune – she’d take on anything. But she’s here. Don’t I know her at all?
Will there be ecstatic utterances and will Calla suddenly rise and keen like the Grecian women wild on the hills, or wail in a wolf’s voice, or speak as hissingly as a cell of serpents?
Stop. I must stop. This is only anticipating that worst which never happens, at least not in the way one imagines. Nothing will happen. Yet my hands are clasped together more tightly than those of the quiet man beside me. What is he thinking? I wouldn’t want to know.
A man has risen. A stubby man, almost stunted, an open candid face, nothing menacing, nothing so absurd that it can’t be borne. He goes to the pulpit. He welcomes one and all, he says, one and all, spreading brown-sleeved arms and smiling trustingly. Now I’m ashamed to be here, as though I’d gatecrashed, come in under false pretences.
Singing. We have to stand, and I must try to make myself narrower so I won’t brush against anyone. A piano crashes the tune. Guitars and one trombone are in support. The voices are weak at first, wavering like a radio not quite adjusted, and I’m shaking with the effort not to giggle, although God knows it’s not amusing me. The voices strengthen, grow muscular, until the room is swollen with the sound of a hymn macabre as the messengers of the apocalypse, the gaunt horsemen, the cloaked skeletons I dreamed of once when I was quite young, and wakened, and she said “Don’t be foolish – don’t be foolish, Rachel – there’s nothing there.” The hymn-sound is too loud – it washes into my head, sea waves of it.
Day of wrath! O day of mourning!
See fulfilled the prophet’s warning!
Heaven and earth in ashes burning!
I hate this. I would like to go home. Sit down. The others are sitting down. Just don’t be noticeable. Oh God – do I know anyone? Suddenly I’m scanning the rows, searching.