Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [86]
look like a stern bunch. Just the same they had dignity--mystery; they were after all the gods, and they made the awards of fate. They ruled the air, the mountains, fire, plants, cattle, luck, sickness, clouds, birth, death. Damn it, even the squattest, kicked over onto his belly, ruled over something. The attitude of the tribe seemed to be that it was necessary to come to the gods with their vices on display, as nothing could be concealed from them anyway by ephemeral men. I grasped the idea, but basically I thought it was a big mistake. I wanted to say to the king, "You mean to tell me all this bad blood is necessary?" Also I marveled that such a man should be king over a gang like this. He took it all pretty calmly, however. By and by they began to move the whole pantheon. Bodily, they started with the smaller gods, whom they handled very roughly and with a lot of wickedness. They let them fall or rolled them around, scolding them us if they were clumsy. Hell! I thought. To me it seemed like a pretty cheap way to behave, although I could see, to be objective about it, plenty of grounds for resentment against the gods. But anyway I didn't care one bit for this. Grumbling, I sat under the shell of my helmet and tried to appear as if it was none of my business. When this crew of ravens came to the larger statues, they tugged and pulled but couldn't manage, and had to call for help from the crowd. One strong man after another jumped into the arena to pick up an idol, toting it from the original position to, let's say, short center field, while cheers and rooting came from the stands. From the stature and muscular development of the champions who moved the larger idols I gathered that this display of strength was a traditional part of the ceremony. Some approached the bigger gods from behind and clasped arms about their middles, some backed up to them like men unloading flour from the tailgate of a truck and hauled them on their shoulders. One gave a twist to the arms of a figure as I had done to the corpse last night. Seeing my own technique applied, I gave a gasp. "What is it, Mr. Henderson?" said the king. "Nothing, nothing, nothing," I said. The group of gods remaining grew small. The strong men had carted them away, almost all of them. The last of these fellows were superb specimens, and I have a good eye for the points of strong men. During a certain period of my life I took quite an interest in weight-lifting and used to train on the barbells. As everyone knows, the development of the thighs counts heavily. I tried to get my son Edward interested; there might have been no Maria Felucca if I had been able to influence him to build his muscles. Although, when all that is said and done, I have grown this portly front and the other strange distortions that attend all the larger individuals of a species. (Like those mammoth Alaska strawberries.) Oh, my body, my body! Why have we never really got together as friends? I have loaded it with my vices, like a raft, like a barge. Oh, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Anyway, from these distortions owing to my scale and the work performed by my psyche. And sometimes a voice has counseled me, crazily, "Scorch the earth. Why should a good man die? Let it be some blasted fool who is dumped in the grave." What wickedness! What perversity! Alas, what things go on within a person! However--I was more and more intensely a spectator--when there were only two gods left, the two biggest (Hummat the mountain god and Mummah the goddess of clouds), there were several strong men who came out and failed. Yes, they flunked. They couldn't stir this Hummat, who had whiskers like a catfish and spines all over his forehead, plus a pair of boulder-like shoulders. After several of them had quit on the job and been hooted and jeered, a fellow came forward wearing a red fez and a kind of jaunty jockstrap of oilcloth. He walked quickly, swinging his open hands, this man who was going to pick up Hummat, and prostrated himself before the god--the first devotional attitude yet shown. Then