Read Online My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page A

settlement at Philadelphia, in 1688; their hope was to escape religious persecution in the unfathomably dreary hills of Humberside, on the North Sea, and to establish a theocracy, under the thunderous leadership of Reverend Rampike, in which they might persecute other Christians. Of more than forty pilgrims in my great-ancestor’s flock, less than half survived the hellish Atlantic crossing of several weeks; the cruelest fate was to have endured weeks of seasickness, dysentery, and despair only to die near the end of the crossing; lucky pilgrims died early on, the coast of England yet in sight. Within a few months of settling in Philadelphia, yet more of Reverend Rampike’s flock died, including his wife and several of his eight children; yet Reverend Rampike seemed weirdly to have flourished in the New World, remarrying, siring more children (nineteen in all), and cutting a fiery swath through this region mostly settled by pacifist Quakers with his hair-raising sermons of original sin, predestination, total-depravity-of-humankind, and infant damnation.
    Like other Christian settlers to the New World, Reverend Rampike believed passionately that child-bearing, child-rearing, and the “bringing of children to salvation” was the primary task; unlike most other Christians of his era or any other, Reverend Rampike believed that children were “but miniature beasts in a crude semblance of human form” who had to be “continuously and severely disciplined” by both their parents and by the community; mothers were warned not to allow their babies to crawl “beyond what was necessary” for the resemblance between the “crawling, bestial baby” and the “serpent on its belly” was “filthy” to behold. The souls of infants luckless enough to die before being baptized went directly to Hell; the souls of those who managed to live longer had a slightly better, though not much better, chance of salvation; for most of mankind was doomed, no matter the effort made for salvation. Adult life was a matter of work, except on the Sabbath; children were to be pressed into work by the age of three, or even two. It must have been that my stern Calvinist ancestor, father of nineteen squawling babies, had reason to know firsthand that babies were “defiled with the stain of original sin, filthy, odious and abominable.” Reverend Rampike did allow for the possibility that there existed, in the most bestial of babies, a divine spark that original sin could not wholly extinguish. This was a spark, Joshua Rampike preached, that “only Jesus Christ Our Savior could breathe upon to fan into the flame of Salvation.”
    Rampike family history! Maybe I am just slightly impressed.
    Quakers—so much more sane, like ourselves!—tended to believe that small children were “pure”—“innocent”—“moist wax to be molded” by caring adult hands.
    Skyler wasn’t sure what he believed. Observing Baby close-up.
    Once Baby was able to totter about upright, Skyler had to concede that Baby was to be an actual person, though Baby would never be a very important actual person, like Skyler himself.
    For Baby would always be a girl. And Skyler was Mummy’s little man.
    As a toddler of two, Edna Louise began to lurch and stumble about “getting into everything like some kind of demon” (as Mummy said). It seemed that Edna Louise was “very pretty” except sometimes you could see that Edna Louise was “downright homely, like me” (as Mummy said).Visitors remarked on Edna Louise’s “beautiful” cobalt-blue eyes but these were also unnerving eyes that stared so hard, sometimes they seemed about to bulge out of their sockets. (Ugh! Secretly Skyler pried both blank blue glass eyes out of the rubber head of Edna Louise’s favorite doll and was frightened by the eyeless sockets and tossed away all the incriminating evidence in the trash where no one, not even Maria-from-Mexico, could find it.) “Such an angel!” visitors to the house were