Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [88]
Picture how they must look from outside, Ian thought. A cleaned and pressed little family walking together to church, discussing matters of theology. Perfect.
From outside.
“Or Abraham and Isaac. That one really ticks me off. God asks Abraham to kill his own son. And Abraham says, ‘Okay.’ Can you believe it? And then at the very last minute God says, ‘Only testing. Ha-ha.’ Boy, I’d like to know what Isaac thought. All the rest of his life, any time his father so much as looked in his direction Isaac would think—”
Ian said, “Agatha, it’s very bad manners to criticize other people’s religion.”
“It’s very bad manners to force your own religion on them, too,” Agatha told him. “Shoot, it’s very unconstitutional. To make me go to church when I don’t want to.”
“Well, you’re right,” Ian said.
“Huh?”
“You’re right, I shouldn’t have done it.”
By now, they had stopped walking. Agatha peered at him. She said, “So can I leave now?”
“You can leave.”
She stood there a moment longer. The other two watched with interest. “Okay,” she said finally. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
She turned and set off toward home.
But without her it seemed so quiet. He missed her firm, opinionated voice and that little trick she had of varying her tone to quote each person’s remarks. No matter how imaginary those remarks might be.
“I the Lord thy God am a jealous God,” Reverend Emmett read from Exodus, and Ian could almost hear Agatha beside him: “Any time we act jealous, people have a fit.” He shook the thought away. He bowed lower in his seat, propping his forehead on two fingers. Next to him, Daphne tore a tiny corner off a page of her hymnal and placed it on her tongue. Thomas was sitting behind them with Kenny Larson and his family. A fly was crawling up the front counter.
Reverend Emmett called for a hymn: “Blessed Assurance.” The congregation rose to sing, standing shoulder to shoulder. Everyone here was familiar to Ian. Or at least, semifamiliar. (Eli Everjohn and his wife were sitting with Sister Bertha, and Mrs. Jordan had brought her cousin.) “This is my story,” they sang, “this is my song …” Ian put an arm around Daphne and she nestled against him as she sang, her voice incongruously husky for such a little girl.
The sermon was on the Sugar Rule. Recently a committee had approached Reverend Emmett suggesting that the rule be dropped. It was just so complicated, they said. Face it, they were eating sugar every day of their lives, one way or another. Even peanut butter contained sugar if you bought it from a supermarket. Reverend Emmett had told them he would meditate on the issue and report his conclusions. What he said this morning—pacing behind the counter, running his long fingers through his forelock—was that the Sugar Rule was supposed to be complicated. “Like error itself,” he said, “sugar creeps in the cracks. You tell yourself you didn’t realize, you were subject to circumstance, you forgot to read the list of ingredients and anyhow, it’s everywhere and it can’t be helped. Isn’t that significant? It’s not that you’ll be damned forever if you take a grain of sugar; nobody says that. Sugar is merely a distraction, not a sin. But I feel it’s important to keep the rule because of what it stands for: the need for eternal watchfulness.”
The children—those who were listening—sent each other disappointed grimaces, but Ian didn’t really care that much. The Sugar Rule was a minor inconvenience, at most. So was the Coffee Rule; so was the Alcohol Rule. The difficult one was the Unmarried Sex Rule. “How can something be right one day and wrong the next?” Cicely had asked him. “And what’s done is done, anyway, and can’t be undone, right?”
He had said, “If I thought that, I wouldn’t be able to go on living.” Then he’d told her he wanted them to get married.
“Married!” Cicely had