Read Online Love and Sleep by John Crowley - Free Book Online Page B

(usually by chance) he would happen upon one of his own old beliefs just coming into being, some practice or complication of ritual which he had used to assume was somehow pre-existent, eternal, given: Ember Days and Rogation Days, feasts and fasts and the reasons for them, the divisions of the next world and its inhabitants. The cult of the Sacred Heart (gruesome Jesus with effulgent exposed organ wrapped in thorns) swept the Church in the early nineteenth century; the choirs of the angels (Thrones Powers Virtues Dominations and the rest) came into being in the late second. It was a pleasure like and unlike the pleasure of opening an old school reader (Roads and Highways) and finding it full of tales of dirigibles and Pullman cars, organ-grinders and circus-wagons, Arbor Day and Armistice Day: what he had then taken for the whole great world shown to be only a transverse section, worldwide maybe but decade-thin, and gone by, now, along with those who had issued it.
    "What would you think, children,” asked Sister Mary Philomel, “if a rich man at dinner heard of a beggar at his door, who had nothing, and sent out to the beggar some food? That would be good of him, wouldn't it? And what if this rich man sent the poor beggar his own dinner? Wouldn't you think he was a good man? And children what if the man sent the beggar his own arm to eat? That would be wonderful charity, wouldn't it? Well Jesus gives us not only His arm or just a part of Him for us to eat but His whole Body. Now think of that.” And they did think of it, only a little horror-struck, unaware that (as Pierce would read years later, and hoot with amazement and triumph to read) Sister Mary Philomel had retailed a common trope of Baroque piety, dating from the years when embattled Catholics were pulling out all the stops on transubstantiation, the years when Sister Mary Philomel's own order was being founded.
    * * * *
    For all that she lived in a world malleable by belief and desire, still Sister paid close attention to mundane reasons, and the daily management of life; Pierce would think of her when his favorite teacher at college, the historian Frank Walker Barr, pointed out how even if the primitive hunter believes his prayers and his magic are what guide his spear to his prey, still he knows he has to sharpen the spear, and learn to aim and throw it.
    "Will God help us if we ask Him?"
    "Yes'ster."
    "Will God help us if we do nothing for ourselves?"
    "Nos'ster."
    "God helps those who help themselves."
    "Yes'ster."
    It was easy enough for Sister to assume her unchallengeable ascendancy over the younger children. Pierce at yellow-brick St. Simon Cyrenean in Brooklyn (separate doors for Boys and Girls) and the Oliphants in a new long low concrete-block and plate-glass St. Longinus on Long Island had learned unbreakable habits of deference. They could make no objection, wronged as they felt themselves to be, when Sister Mary Philomel organized them into after-school work details, to clean the fishbowl her fat carp swam in, to cut out turkeys and shamrocks and lilies green and white to festoon her walls at the proper seasons, not even when she took it on herself to have them mop their bedroom floors and remake their beds, like prison trusties.
    But Joe Boyd was a harder case. It was apparent he was too old for the miniature classroom and its cutouts and flashcards. As much as she could Sister Mary Philomel set Joe Boyd problems and readings to be done by himself in the cold but at least private windowed room beyond the kitchen. Though she was cautious with Joe Boyd, she wasn't afraid of him; she chose carefully the instances when she would try conclusions with him, and almost always she won, gracious if unbending in victory and including him in that teacher's “we” that cut him too deep for words: Are we ready to start on our assignment now?
    He was one of those spirits Pierce would always marvel at, supposing them to be rare: those who grant no absolute