CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It's Sunday morning. Beautiful. Sunlight dazzling on the dew. I'm in the garden.
I don't go to church. I haven't since Agnes and I had our last battle over it: it was another Sunday morning, but I was thirteen. We were facing each other in the hall. I had refused to put on my shoes. We were late again. She was mad at me.
"If you do not, this instant, Henry- "
"You'll what?" Already taller than her, I was hormonal and belligerent and hated nearly everything but especially Sunday mornings. The sermons, the sour-milk scent of the prayers, being crushed between the grim, eternally-bleeding Crucifixion gazing down at me from the rood screen and the grabby eyes of the parishioners around me. Even worse was the sensation I felt passing the threshold each week, as though something inside me was being shaved away little by little. It had become a crisis. I was prepared to make her call in backup. That would be Jepson, who was probably still asleep; my odds looked good.
"I've had quite enough of this argument. We are finished with this. As long as I am in this house, you'll be going, and that's final. Henry. Put them on at once."
I hunched forward and slid one foot halfway into a shoe. From the corner of my eye I saw her shoulders relax, and I prepared my opening.
"Do animals go to heaven?" I made my voice casual as possible, as if this question had only just occurred to me.
She sighed, still irritated. "What do you think? Of course not. Heaven is for people. Animals haven't any souls. Hurry, please."
"Even smart animals?"
She fell right into the trap. "There's a difference between smart animals and people, Henry. Which you are aware of. Our Lord created man last, and in His image. Stop being ridiculous. Put the shoe on."
"What about people who are animals on the inside? When did Our Lord create those?" I tied the shoelace in a neat bow. "Maybe it was an accident. Or... maybe... He didn't." I made it sound innocuous, but her face spasmed and she turned away sharply.
"That's enough. I will be waiting outside." Her voice was thick and the back of her neck had flushed terra-cotta.
"I doubt He would create a man who is an animal on the inside. I wonder who did," I said to her back. "If I've prayed, and He hasn't answered, that's likely the reason. Seems I don't need to go to church after all."
Her shoulders stiffened and without looking back she strode to the door and went outside. I celebrated. But she didn't turn towards the church; instead she walked up and down the road outside the gate for a quarter of an hour with her arms folded. When she came back inside, shutting the door gently behind her, I was at the table with the comic page of the newspaper, enjoying my victory.
She stood over me. "I see you think you've won. But I will not let you stand behind what you've just said to me. It's reprehensible."
"I'm not going anymore," I said baldly. "I hate it."
"You're not an animal, Henry, and the devil did not make you."
We stared into one another's eyes.
"I'm not not an animal," I said, "and you don't know what made me."
"I do know," she said. "I know your family. Your mother and father," she took a long, shuddering breath, "and your uncle, who was very much like you."
"Did he go to church?" And my answer was a sudden desolation in her eyes. Checkmate; victory was mine.
"I know I have a soul," I finished, "and I'm not sorry about being myself, but I won't go to church any more. I don't feel good when I'm in there."
Her expression grew blank, as though she'd retreated inside herself, and I knew that it was all over. "And I want to be allowed outside at night," I yelped, a last greedy grab. She didn't seem to hear. Instead she rose, picked up her bag mechanically, and walked out the door again. A few moments later the door banged and there she was, running back in to grip me in a fierce shivering hug, and to press her dry powdery cheek against mine before leaving for church alone.
.
It's a Sunday morning again, and Agnes is away on her pew making peace with her Creator, and I'm in the garden in the sun. I've been weeding. Seamus is upside-down on the newly tilled soil, laughing, his dirty shirttail hanging over his face, proving to me that he can walk on his hands.
.
That's not to say that I am devoid of spirituality. Like all living things, I must return to that which is my Creator as well, but after my own fashion. Dusk is just falling. Now I am alone in the back field and I am doing the thing I am often impelled to do, for what reason I don't know; I am climbing a tree.
The leaves are patting against me in the wind like a thousand hands. The branch I'm on is strong enough to hold my weight, but only just, and I can feel the tension at its fork, and even this tension is reassuring to me. It is the same tension as in all life. The ground is far below, and just above me paper-wasps are swirling in the canopy.
This high up I can see the woods like a map, an expanse of emerald clumps and the few black claws that didn't make it through the winter. This high up my existence makes perfect sense. I am just like anything else, just like every other animal, just like the wasps, like the sap under my fingernails, like the sound of an entire forest's worth of leaves snapping together in the wind; all of these things justified completely merely by their own existence; all of these things necessary, all of them perfect even in the most artless stages of their form.
.
I've opened the window of my library to let the night air in. With it came a little brown moth and she's batting her wings against the glass of the oil lamp on my desk. Outside I can hear the faint whirring of bats as they swirl past the window. They'll eat her if she flies out, and if she stays in she'll end up in the chimney of my lamp. Her shadow flickers across the passage I'm reading:
All that we see- is dome, or vault, or nest,
Or fortress, reared at Nature's sage command.
Nature's sage command. They- men, even the one who wrote this- don't understand what Nature actually commands, but I do. I can smell it. Hear it like a whisper in the room. And I still remember its taste. This poem I'm reading is beautiful to the ear, but like most of the stories man writes about the earth, it's naive. There is no 'sage command' to what exists outside the window, no benevolent order, no cruelty either. There is only the great neutrality, the endless, mindless knot which is constantly absorbing itself, which has no purpose but its own existence. Whose ruthless equality is so frightening to man that they reframe it, retell it with religion, personify it as myth: Mother Nature, the queen, the teacher, the benefactor. The original mother. Endlessly forgiving. Endlessly bountiful. It's a lie. What's more, I believe they know it is a lie. I believe that hidden inside each of these poems, inside each song and hymn, is a tiny whisper of fear. And I believe that inside that fear is the honesty.
If you do not fear Nature you have never met it. For most men here in the country the term Nature delineates everything outside the back door: fields and meadows, long days tilling in the rain, a fox in the henhouse, an idyllic afternoon at the creek's edge, an early frost scotching the crop. Pastoral beauty and pastoral discomfort. A tricky resource. A set of circumstances which, if one is mindful of its laws, can be of use. Or of harm if you are careless and don't outsmart it. Something you close the door on when the cold winds start to blow. Nature becomes an environment one can step out of.
This is the false sense of superiority that occurs when no one is waiting in the hedge to eat you.
You might paint me a convincing case that modern man has extricated himself from Nature except for one thing, and that is the little bag of hair and salt that Seamus brought me. Sometime in the past, probably when I was a child, a farmer knelt at the fence line in the dark and dug down. I can imagine it: the white moon lighting the skyline crest of trees, the rustling in the dark all around him, his breath a mist around his head. He most likely felt foolish. He most likely told no one what he had done, afterward. But the impulse persisted. Because somewhere in his bones, deep in the obscure coding of his ancestry, lived the memory of being hunted in the night.
Our parish church is old, almost as old as Harthome, and it is full of rats. It was the first church I'd ever attended. For the first several months of Sundays I never listened to a word of the sermon. Instead I listened to the rats running in the bellcote and watched as the rising sun changed each thick disc of the window's crown glass to a glowing greenish eye. The rector's mouth would move. Sounds came out. I didn't pay any attention. Then one morning as I was tabulating the number of coughs coming from the pews behind me- seventeen, a record- his voice crept its way in to my listening ear and I met, for the first time in my life, Genesis. "Replenish the earth," the rector said, and it was though the flat little slice of his mouth was speaking only to me, "and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Have dominion, I thought. Subdue the earth, I thought. I looked up at him and laughed and Agnes smacked me hard on the knee with her Bible.
Dualism as a concept wasn't new to me, of course. Nor hierarchy. I'd privately been struggling with finding, inside myself, the difference between man and animal. But this was the first time I'd heard the official proscription from the mouth of the Lord. And at that moment I understood clearly: this was a fairytale with two sides, and the rector was not on mine.
That was all right, though. I preferred my side. The rector and the others were suffering from a delusion of control, believing as they did that they were shepherds of the earth. I knew better. Nature is its own shepherd; at night it opens the paddock gates so the wolves can come in and eat. And the earth is preparing itself for the rector, not for his dominion, but to feed his bones to the little lambs.
Outside my window I hear Nature roaring. I scoop the little moth up, wings vibrating in the cup of my hand, and before I close the sash I toss her out into the dark where she belongs.