A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [59]
“No. I didn’t, Calla. Honestly.” But she doesn’t believe me. She has been worrying about this, utterly unknown to me. It has never crossed my mind. God’s irony – that we should for so long believe it is only the few who speak in tongues. “What did he say?”
Calla takes a mouthful of iced tea and leans back, deciding to masquerade nonchalance, but doing it so clumsily that all at once I know she’ll painfully and unnecessarily review it later when it’s too late to change how it has been spoken.
“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification. Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me.”
“Maybe he didn’t mean –”
What am I doing, for heaven’s sake? Apologizing for the apostle’s appallingly accurate sight? I don’t ever remember having heard the words before, much as I was supposed to have been reared on the black leather book. What he says isn’t what should be. It’s merely what is.
Calla smiles, and offers me a cigarette, her thonged feet outsplayed on the floor, her bulk now leaning forward, her spiky grey hair wavering stiffly as though her head were paradoxically covered with sprigs of dried lavender.
“Yeh, he meant it, all right, Rachel. But you have to see it in context.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure.”
The falseness of this does not escape her, and she smiles again, as though she now were protected against everything, including me, by a thousand mysteries.
“He says, as well, among a lot of other yakkity-yak, If any man among you thinketh himself to be wise, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. I mean, there you are. I thought to myself – Calla, you old cow, there you are.”
“Where?”
“Home-free,” she says, having apparently settled it, but still, I think, waiting for my reaction. “So I went back to the Tabernacle, see, bold as brass and twice as loud. My old usual self, you might say. I thought, well, there’s your clue, kiddo, and if the word that comes to mind is Hallelujah, then it’s Hallelujah, so what can you do about it? You didn’t destroy me, Rachel. Not that you meant to. But, I mean, you didn’t. It’s only right you should know.”
“I’m –” I don’t know what on earth to say. “I’m glad.”
“You’re not glad,” Calla says curtly. “How could you be? You don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, pardon me all to blazes, and for heaven’s sake don’t put your elbow any farther back or you’ll touch the wet paint. I spoke, by the way – that’s what I set out to tell you.”
“You mean –?”
“Yeh. Amazing, eh? It was given to me. To me, already. Not in the Tabernacle, I must say. Maybe just as well. I mean, who would have been able to interpret? St. Paul says there should be somebody there to interpret.”
She has left me behind. I’m not following her. And yet I’m not so much frightened, not any more. It won’t happen to me. I won’t become eccentric, moving in some private pattern only, speaking oddities which seem quite usual to me and other wise to others – hilarious to the cruel, terrifying to the slightly more observant. Not now. Not any more. She could be mad as any April fool and it wouldn’t infect me.
Perhaps he will phone me tonight. Nick? Listen –
“Where did it happen, then?”
“Here,” she says. “When I was alone.”
“Oh?”
“Yeh. It just began, and – I don’t guess I could describe it, Rachel. It was peace. Like some very gentle falling of rain. Sounds funny, eh?”
“No – no, not at all.” It sounds insane.
“Well, enough of that,” Calla says, briskly clearing the glasses with the slices of lemon tea – logged and limp at the bottom. “Listen, you never saw Jacob, eh?”
“Who?”
“My canary. He doesn’t like all this painting deal, so I’ve put him in the bedroom for the time being.”
She leads me into the room which contains a single bed, cherry chenille-covered, and a dresser in whitewood which she has stained silver-grey,