Sweet land stories - E. L. Doctorow [40]
A prophet is not the Son of God, he is one of you, he is an ordinary man of remorse, like you, and so his numbers are no more infinite than the years of his life are infinite. He cannot die for mankind’s sins. He may only work to remove the sin of this or that soul, taking it into himself and adding it into himself. Whatever faults you in the eyes of God—your carnal desires, your greed, your attachment to what is unworthy—your mortal prophet lifts from you and takes unto himself. And he does that until the weight of the numbers will bury him and he is welcomed in Hell. For he is an ordinary mortal and if he takes on your sins they become his own and it is to Hell he will go—not to God at His right hand but to the Devil in the depths of Hell’s eternal torment. “Only the adults purified by this prophecy will join the virgin children in the Holy City to come,” Walter John Harmon said. “And I will not be among them.”
THERE WAS consternation at those words. We knew because the Transference of Sin was the key to his teaching that Walter risked exclusion from the Holy City. We had discussed it at our Meetings. The prophecy was Jesus-like but not Jesus, it was Moses-like but not Moses. Yet to hear it put in mathematical terms was shocking—people stood and cried out, because now Walter John Harmon was speaking of something as incontestable as a sum, as measurable as a weight or a volume, and the reality of such a cut-and-dried formulation seemed almost too much for us to bear.
He did not walk away but looked over us with a faint smile on his lips. Was he suggesting that his doom was imminent? His blond and graying hair was tied this morning into a ponytail, which made him seem younger than his thirty-seven years. And at this moment his pale blue eyes were those of a youth unaware of the tragedy of his life. As he stood and waited, the members were slowly calmed by his silence. We went to him, and knelt, and kissed his robe. Perhaps I was the only one this day to feel that his words were a personal communication. They seemed to be responding to my torments, as if, having intuited my reluctance to seek his counsel, Walter John Harmon had chosen this way to remind me of his truth and to restore the strength of my conviction. But that was the effect always, after all, for the power of his word was in its uncanny precise application to whatever had been in your own mind though you might not have before realized it.
All who heard him this day knew the truth of his prophecy and the resolution and peace of surrendering to it. I felt once again the privilege of the Seven Attainments. I loved Walter John Harmon. How then could I fault my wife’s love for him?
A WEEK OR so later I dressed for the outer world and drove one of our SUVs to the state courthouse in Granger, a trip of some sixty miles. Whenever I walked into a courthouse now, I felt a great unease, as an alien in a strange land. Yet I had passed the bar exams of three contiguous states and had spent my adult life in the general practice of law and so there was simultaneously a professional sense of belonging to such buildings as this old red stone horror with its corner cupolas, which dominated the square at the city’s center. It spoke to me as the native architecture of my own American past, and when I climbed the worn steps and heard my heels clicking on the floor of the entry hall, I had to remind myself that I was an envoy from the future, about to address in their own vocabulary the denizens of the dark ages of secular life.
This was to be a hearing before an administrative judge. The state commissioner of education had moved to suspend the Community’s license to school its children. A failure to comply with the statutes requiring mandatory literacy for every child was said to be grounds for a suspension. We were met not in a courtroom but in a room used mostly for jury empaneling in tort cases. It had big windows and dark-green shades pulled against the morning