A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [19]
Oh Rachel. Carp, carp. Is that all you know how to do? The Tabernacle has too much gaudiness and zeal, and this has too little.
My father would never go to church. She used to say, “It isn’t very nice, Niall, for a man in your position not to go.” Perhaps she thought his absence would imply that when he dressed the dead and combed their hair, he did it in the conviction that they’d found by now all there was – oblivion. Undoubtedly he did think so. Immortality would have appalled him, perhaps as much as it does me.
“Why on earth do they let him?” Mother hisses softly.
“What?”
“Tom Gillanders – he’s going to sing a solo. Honestly. I ask you.”
“Well, he’s been in the choir such a long time. Mr. MacElfrish doesn’t like to say no, I guess.”
Inwardly, though, I’m as much on edge as Mother. Tom Gillanders used to have a good voice, but that was years ago. He must be eighty now. He rises in the choir loft and stands alone, his black choir gown making him look like an emaciated crow.
Jerusalem the golden,
with milk and honey blest –
His voice is like the grating of sandpaper on rough wood. Sometimes it trembles and he loses the tune entirely. How can he do it? Doesn’t he know how he sounds and how it makes him look?
Did I, in the Tabernacle? Did I know? I knew, and still I couldn’t help it. Maybe the old man knows, too, and still cannot help it. If I believed, I would have to detest God for the brutal joker He would be if He existed.
I know not, O I know not
What joys await us there –
He’s wandered away from the accompaniment, and the organist is fumbling madly to find him again. Beside me, Mother squirms. I can’t blame her. Surely one might reasonably expect not to have to be embarrassed in this church, at least.
When I was a child, some people called Dukes had a mongoloid son. I remember him as a huge creature, but possibly because I was small. He must have been about sixteen then, his face puffy and his eyes, seeing but blind, almost buried within that unhealthy-looking flesh. They used to bring him to church sometimes, and those Sundays were a torment as pure as anything I’ve known since. He would talk aloud, in a high slurred voice, all through the service, but still they’d stay, on and on, and wouldn’t leave unless he started saying swear words. Or even worse. I got to pee, Mama. And everyone would sit with burning faces, pretending they hadn’t heard.
Well, thank God, the old man has finished, and at last the benediction is pronounced, and we are allowed to go.
“They shouldn’t let him,” Mother says, as we walk. “It’s a disgrace. Don’t you think so, yourself, Rachel?”
“Yes. Yes, I certainly do.”
And yet with some part of myself I am inexplicably angry at this agreement.
Willard did not come to my classroom today, as he usually does when he has something to say. Instead he sent a note, saying would I please go to his office. I feel I’m being summoned like a naughty child. What right has he? What have I done?
Willard is sitting behind his desk. He has his glasses off and is rubbing his eyes as though they were sore or sleepy. This gives him, momentarily, a look of such vulnerability that I feel almost affectionate towards him, and want to draw back swiftly so he won’t know and be troubled by the intrusion of my seeing him this way. He guards and cherishes his dignity so much. And now I remember his telling me once that he had to start wearing glasses when he first went to college, and he detested them. That’s the only personal thing he has ever told me about himself. For some reason it touched me, and I could imagine him, straight from the small town where he grew up, and made gauche as well by his shortness, just as I was by my height, and then having spectacles to add to his misery.
He puts his glasses back on, and the heavy navy-blue frames define and