A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
I didn’t. I didn’t. It was only to be able to sleep. The shadow prince. Am I unbalanced? Or only laughable? That’s worse, much worse.
I feel myself sinking at last into the smooth silence where no lights or voices are. When the voices and lights begin again, in there where I am lying, they are not bright or loud.
– Stairs rising from nowhere, and the wallpaper the loose-petalled unknown flowers. The stairs descending to the place where I am not allowed. The giant bottles and jars stand there, bubbled green glass. The silent people are there, lipsticked and rouged, powdered whitely like clowns. How funny they look, each lying dressed in best, and their open eyes are glass eyes, cat’s eye marbles, round glass beads, blue and milky, unwinking. He is behind the door I cannot open. And his voice – his voice – so I know he is lying there among them, lying in state, king over them. He can’t fool me. He says run away Rachel run away run away. I am running across thick grass and small purple violets – weeds – dandelions. The spruce trees bend, bend down, hemming in and protecting. My mother is singing in a falsetto voice, the stylish tremolo, the ladies’ choir voice.
Bless this house dear Lord we pray, keep it safe by night and day.
TWO
Brushing away the curtains with my hand and leaning a moment out my window, I can feel the fineness of the day. Even the spruces look light, the needled boughs having lost their darkness in the sun and now looking evergreen as they are meant to, and not everblack as they seem when the sky is overcast. The sky today is the colour of the turquoise in the bracelet my father gave me as a child.
I must hurry or I’ll be late. That’s one thing I can say for myself. I’ve never been late for school in all this time, never once. When I first began teaching, Mother used to call me every morning, but now I waken before she does.
My underwear is all getting that shabby too-much-washed look. I must get some more. I always think what does it matter – who sees but me? But that’s a wrong attitude. It’s not even the thought of being run over and taken to hospital and pried into, everything underneath seen and sized up. It’s self-respect, really. When Stacey was here the last time she came into my bedroom while I was dressing. She never knocked or said could she come in. Maybe in her house everyone is so casual they never bother. She saw me putting on the same things I’d worn the day before, the same everything. She said, “Don’t you change every day?” And then, as though she believed she intended it only to explain or pardon me, “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter quite so much if you’re not living with anyone.” But it was only because I hadn’t got my laundry done over the weekend, and I hadn’t got it done on account of her, for she’d just arrived then. Usually I changed. It hardly ever happened that I didn’t. I told her so. My voice was not upset in the slightest. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
I didn’t, though. I didn’t say a word. I don’t know why I didn’t. Stupid. Stupid. How could I not have?
What is more stupid is to think of it now. As if it mattered. I’ve been very careful ever since then, though. A person could let themselves go, without noticing. It could happen.
Hurry, hurry, Rachel, or you’ll be late for school. All right. All right. I’m hurrying.
Mother has a letter in her hands and is unfolding it.
“One thing about Stacey,” she says, “she is always very good about writing. I don’t think she’s ever missed a week, has she? It can’t be easy, with the four children to look after, and that big house.”
“No, I suppose not.”
Considering that Stacey does nothing else for Mother, writing once a week doesn’t seem such an exorbitant effort. When Stacey was here that time, seven years ago, I asked her at the end of the one week if she wouldn’t consider staying a month. The children would be all right with Mac’s sister, and it would mean a lot to Mother. Stacey wouldn’t, though. “I guess it must sound crazy to you, Rachel, but another three weeks and I’d be up the walls – I don’t mean because of anything here and that – it’s just missing Mac – not only around and to talk to – I mean, in bed.” What made her so certain it would sound crazy to me?
Mother is reading Stacey’s letter aloud. She always does, as though not entrusting it to my hands and eyes. Sometimes I think she occasionally leaves parts out. Stacey can be extremely outspoken, and if it was a reference to me, Mother wouldn’t let me see.
Oh Lord – I’ve no evidence, none, of any pitying or slamming phrase.
“… less than a month till summer holidays – horrors! Although I guess Rachel will be glad. Her free season starts when mine finishes. But I have to admit the kids are pretty good generally these days – the boys already making plans for putting up tent in back yard and sleeping there – mighty woodsmen and all that – perfectly safe, Mother, so don’t panic –”
Stacey always rattles on in this way. It is nice for Mother to get news of the grandchildren, of course. Stacey flutters around those children such a lot. Every time one of them has a cold or a sore throat, we hear about it. She’d learn not to fuss if she had thirty to cope with every weekday. Four on her hands for only two months, and in summer, doesn’t seem such a terrible prospect to me. But she worries all the time about them. She’s not doing them any favour, hovering over them like that, especially the boys.
Is it true, what she said that time, and I can’t understand? When I said why not stay longer, and she said that about Mac, then she told me she couldn’t be away from the children any longer, either. “I know they’re quite okay, and safe, but I don’t feel sure unless I’m there, and even then I never feel sure – I don’t think I can explain – it’s just something you feel about your own kids, and you can’t help it.”
She didn’t think I could see that, or know at all. She’s so positive she understands everything. She doesn’t give anyone else credit for having the slightest degree of –
Damn. I’ve slopped my coffee on to my saucer and it’s burned my hand.
“Well, I’m surprised she’d let the boys sleep out in the yard. She’s so everlastingly particular with them.”
“I wouldn’t have said that,” Mother fences, offended. “She takes decent care of them. That’s hardly a fault. But I wouldn’t have said she was too particular.”
League of matriarchs. Mothers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your children. Then they wonder why people want to leave home. Stacey’s will do just as she did, quite likely, and she’ll never know why.
Willard is waiting for me in my classroom. He’s standing there with his back to me. Although he’s short, he looms against the light from the window. His back is hunched, like a picture of a vulture in a geography book, and then I see it is only because he is stooping to look at something on my desk. What is he looking for? What has he found? Have I done something? He straightens and wheels and faces me.
“Morning, Rachel,” he says, pleasantly enough. “I was just having a look at your attendance sheet.”
“Oh –” I can feel my face becoming bleached, for absolutely no reason. “Why?”
“James Doherty’s been away quite a lot recently, I see.”
“He’s had tonsillitis.” Why should Willard pry? He has no right to open my desk.
“He was away most of this week, I see.”
“Yes. It was the same trouble. Sore throat and fever. I phoned his mother.”
Willard frowns. “You did?”
He makes it sound such a curious thing to have done, and now I see that perhaps it was. I needn’t have phoned his mother. It isn’t usual.
“He’d been having so many bouts of tonsillitis, I just wondered – and I thought maybe I should – so I just, I mean, gave her a ring –”
Worse. I’ve made it worse. I can see myself stumbling and floundering through the words, like wading through deep snow.
“Did he bring a note when he came back yesterday?” Willard asks.
“Oh yes. Of course. Here, I’ve got it somewhere. It must be somewhere in my desk. I gener
“It’s all right,” Willard is saying, quite gently. “I’ll take your word for it.”
He sighs and takes his glasses off to clean them, breathing on them noisily and then polishing with his handkerchief.
“I’m reluctant to bring this up, Rachel,” he says ponderously, “and you may certainly rest assured that I am not in any way blaming you for it. But I’m afraid you may have to have a word with the boy’s mother. Angela paints, as you know –”
I can’t see the connection. Willard’s wife marches regularly down into the valley beyond town, carrying a portable easel, looking most peculiar, and returning with little sketches labelled Banks of the Wachakwa.
“… and this is the third time,” Willard is saying, “that she’s encountered the Doherty boy. Not encountered him, exactly, but seen him in the distance, running into the bushes. On school days. Unmistakably him. You could spot that red hair a mile away.”
Does James hate school that much? He loves to draw pictures. I always thought that even though he found arithmetic difficult, he enjoyed some subjects. I always thought he responded when I spoke to him about his drawings. I thought he liked me, at least some.
“His mother,” Willard says, “is partly to blame, for giving him notes to excuse his absence. I think you’d be well advised to have a talk with her, before we notify the truant officer. It’s possible that a little straight speaking, coming from the school, might be sufficient.”
I’m angry enough at Grace Doherty to be able to speak my mind. What does she think she’s doing? How can a child’s mother be so irresponsible, as though it didn’t amount to anything, as though he didn’t amount to anything? I could say it to her this instant. But it won’t be until tomorrow or next week, and that I dread.
Willard is a good principal. All at once I’m grateful to him for not having gone directly to the truant officer, who has been old so long that he’d no longer comprehend how a boy might be drawn to the valley at this time of year, after the shut-in winter, without its necessarily meaning a thing. But Grace – how could she? She ought to know better. The ignorance of some people is too much. She doesn’t deserve to have him.
“In the meantime,” Willard says, turning to go, “I think you’d better send the young man in question into my office. Around ten o’clock will do nicely.”
“You’re not going to – you won’t strap him?”
“I don’t see,” Willard blandly says, “that I have any alternative.”
He is smiling as thinly as a skull. His eyes seem covered with a film of respectable responsibility, grave concern, the sadness of duty’s necessity, all to conceal the shame-burning of pleasure.
“It won’t do him any good.” This is true. I don’t feel certain of much, but I feel certain of this.
“We don’t know that, Rachel, do we?” Willard says. “I would venture to put forth the opinion that under the circumstances it is decidedly worth a try. We must not let our emotions get the better of us, mustn’t we?”
What of his emotions, Willard’s, the ones he would not admit to having? Yet now I can’t argue. I don’t know whether I only feel the way I do because I care about James, and wouldn’t willingly see him hurt. Is there a better reason for not wanting him hurt? Now I no longer know whether I have the right to feel as I do. How could I be wrong about this, when I feel it so? Or can a person be mistaken about everything? Willard’s a good principal. I said so to myself not a moment ago.
“I’ll send him in, then.” There’s a dullness in my voice. Willard has won. Maybe he is even right. He has two of his own. Could I be expected to know what is best?
“Good girl,” Willard says.
But when I’ve sent James in, and he has returned, his face like bone, his eyes staring my betrayal at me, then I want only to go to Willard and tell him to listen, just to listen. I am not neutral – I am not detached – I know it. But neither are you, and you do not know it.
I won’t go, though. The day seems to have ended, and yet I still sit at my desk, thinking quite calmly how much I would like to leave this school. How is it I can still be afraid of losing my job?
“Hello, child.”
Calla is standing in the doorway looking like a wind-dishevelled owl, a great horned owl, her fringed hair like grey-brown feathers every which way, her eyes ringed with the round brown frames of the glasses she wears only rarely so that they never stop seeming unusual on her. She looks so comically earnest that I feel badly, and wonder why I haven’t asked her over to our place more often. I’ve gone to her place often enough, and she always makes an occasion of it, and toasts sandwiches and buys a bakery cake. I should care what Mother thinks of her. What does it matter? If only Calla wouldn’t insist on talking about the Tabernacle in Mother’s hearing. Mother thinks the whole thing is weird in the extreme, and as for anyone speaking in a clarion voice about their beliefs – it seems indecent to her, almost in the same class as what she calls foul language. Then I get embarrassed for Calla, and ashamed of being embarrassed, and would give anything to shut her up or else to stop minding.
“Remember saying you’d like to come along with me to the next special service, Rachel?”
“Oh yes. That’s right. I did.” I feel the weight of the granite inside. No escape now. I brought this on myself.
“I didn’t want to mention this before, not until we were more sure of it – sure it would last, you know, and was the genuine article and not just a nine-day wonder or something –”
“Mention what?”
“Well, a few – some of us – not many, you know, so far, but some –” Calla’s usually firm voice fumbles, “some have been given, it seems, the gift of tongues.”
What shows in my face? I dare not think. Whatever it is, it makes her forge explanations instantly, strongbows of argument, as if she believes I’m bound to be conquered by them.
“It was a perfectly accepted thing in the early Church. Nobody thought there was anything strange in it then. We hold ourselves too tightly these days, that’s the trouble. Afraid to let the Spirit speak through us. Saint Paul cautions, of course. Not to let it take the place of ordinary prayer which can be understood by everyone. We’ve been careful about that. But he accepts it, Saint Paul, I mean. He says I thank my God I speak with tongues more than ye all. And what about the tongues of men and of angels? What else does the tongues of angels mean, if not glossolalia?”
“What?”
She can’t mean a word of it. But she does. I don’t know which way to look, and yet I can’t take my eyes off her face. She doesn’t look fanatical. She looks sturdily cheerful and now something else – determined to make me see.
“Glossolalia,” she says. “That is the correct word for it. But we mostly say the gift of tongues or ecstatic utterances because – well, those words describe it better, see?”
“People speak – aloud – and don’t know what they’re saying? And nobody else knows, either?”
“Sometimes another one can interpret,” Calla says, talking quickly but in a subdued voice quite unlike her usual. “Listen, child, I know it must sound unbelievable. I thought so, too, at first. But now I know – well, I just know. I’ve seen it happen. Even if no one understands, the undeniable thing is the peace the person who’s been gifted comes back with.”
“Have you –?”
She looks for a moment stricken, her square, strong face saddened as though by some deprivation.
“No, it hasn’t been given to me. Not yet, anyhow.”
All I can think about is what if it’s given to her tonight? If I have to endure to be there, and see her rising, hypnotized, and hear her known voice speaking gibberish, I think I will faint. How to get out of it? I can’t bear watching people make fools of themselves. I don’t know why, but it threatens me. It swamps me, and I can’t look, the way as children we used to cover our eyes with our hands at the dreaded parts in horror movies.
Calla is l
“Perhaps you’ll not want to come along now. I had to tell you, though. It wouldn’t have been right not to. If you don’t want to come, Rachel, it’s quite okay. Don’t worry about it. I wouldn’t want that.”
“Oh, I’m not worried in the slightest.” The lie rises to my mouth before I can prevent it, and then I have to go on. “I’ll come along, Calla. Of course I will. I said I would.”
There is some obscure comfort in this. At least I’m not breaking my word.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. Certainly.”
Why am I trapped into this falseness? I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I don’t want to argue. I just don’t feel up to it.
But I don’t want to go. I cannot bring myself to go.
Calla smiles so thankingly that I feel I ought to say No, don’t, or to warn her. When she has gone, I’m left with this helplessness. I can’t go. I can’t not go.
I’m to meet Calla at the Tabernacle. I told Mother we were going to a movie. If I had said Calla’s place, she might have phoned.
I’m not sorry it’s raining this evening. It means that hardly anyone is out. That’s stupid – even if I did meet someone I know, how could they tell where I’m going? What about at the door of the Tabernacle, though? That’s what bothered me most the last time. If anyone sees, it is certain to be one of Mother’s bridge cronies, and the information will be relayed back at sonic speed, and there will be the kind of scene I dread, with Mother speaking more in sorrow than anger, as she’s always claimed she was doing.
Japonica Street is deserted. The sidewalks are slippery and darkly shining like new tar with the rain, and the leaves on the maples are being pulled and torn like newspaper in the wind. The lawns have that damp deep loam smell that comes with the rain in spring.
This raincoat is the only new thing I’ve bought this season. I’m glad I got white. It looks quite good, and I thought that on a black night such as this it would be almost luminous, more easily seen by a driver if I’m crossing a badly lighted street.