Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [6]
I loved the word chariot. I couldn’t sing it without thinking of the cherries in my uncle’s orchard, which I’d seen once, and where my father had lifted me up into the branches so that I could pick the half-ripe fruit. Sweet chariot, sweet cherries, gold and red and green, a kind of glowing flush like heat on the skin of the little fruit, which was smooth and cleft and satisfying on the tongue as the word: chariot. This was the way the images invited us to dream into them.
I don’t think I had any awareness of the second religion, the codes of explanation and prohibition, until after her death. I was five. She died of a heart attack, throwing her bedroom window open, in winter, and gasping for air. I remember most vividly being wrapped in a quilt, one she made, I imagine. I watched TV very early in the morning, at an hour when I wasn’t usually awake, and saw the minister come in his black jacket and collar, his odd flowery scent. And then gladiolas around her coffin, and again that sweet essence of peppermint and lavender, and little ribbons decorating the flowers on her grave. I dreamed that she came to see me, in the night, and stood beside a cane chair in a circle of lamplight to speak to me—very softly and intimately and comfortingly, though I haven’t any memory at all of what she said.
My understanding of a more worldly religion began after that. One Sunday there was a sermon especially for children—I believe this was in a Presbyterian church in Nashville, or perhaps in Memphis—instead of the usual Sunday School Bible stories accompanied by big colored pictures. (What were they? I want to say chromolithographs, or engravings, perhaps because the pictures and their sense of the world, an ancient and quaint exoticism they portrayed, seem so firmly of the nineteenth century.) This Sunday, no “Baby Moses in the Bulrushes” or “Joseph in His Coat of Many Colors.” Instead, the minister told us a story about the terrible dangers of desire.
A little girl’s mother had baked a particularly beautiful pie, and set it on the dining table to cool, saying to her daughter, “Make sure that you do not touch this pie.” The girl thought about this, and tried not to touch the impossibly attractive thing. But after a time, overcome by her longing, she simply could not resist anymore, and she decided that if she snitched—that was the word he used, snitched (a particularly pinched, ratlike little word, it seems to me now, full of disdain and pettiness)—just one little piece it would be all right. So she did, taking the little bit of pie into the closet and eating it in the dark where no one could see her. The morsel eaten, she was still filled with hunger; the pie was so good, she wanted it so badly. So she would snitch just one more piece, and eat it in the dark surrounded by the comforting wool of her parents’ coats. But, of course, that didn’t satisfy her either; once a contract with appetite had been entered into, there wasn’t any turning back. And standing in the dark, her hands and lips covered with the evidence of her need, the little girl felt, suddenly, seen. She was watched and she knew it, and so she turned her face upward into the dark from which that sense of witness came, and there, floating above her, was the eye of God: enormous, missing nothing, utterly implacable.
My parents told me that when we came home after this sermon, I hid under my bed and wouldn’t come out. I don’t recall that now, but I do remember inventing a new game, which I used to play alone, since my sister was ten years older and I might as well have been an