Читать книгу Rochester Knockings - Hubert Haddad - Страница 19

XI.

Reverend Gascoigne and Family

Between two clouds wherein all of memory’s tombstones seemed to be knocked over, the April sun suddenly inundated the fields and meadows with a light more delicious than a sip of pure water. Sitting at his old oak desk, his sermon board as he called it, Reverend Gascoigne was considering Pearl’s movements. She had come to a halt at the window she’d just opened, slightly bent over, surely captured by the clearing after the storm. One could hear the quiet step of a horse ridden by some cowboy. Was he going to stop in Hydesville or continue on his route toward Rochester? Pearl had closed the window again and lightly, eloquent of beauty and grace in her chiffon dress with its inlaid belt, she pivoted in a turn to the right, exactly like in a waltz, but with a slowness that gave each of her gestures a simple domestic necessity: picking up a jar of sulfide, rearranging a bouquet of forget-me-nots and blue lilies of the valley, a quick blowing away of some pretext of dust . . .

“Pearl! Pearl!” the pastor was impatient. “Do you have something to ask of me to be circling around like a pitiful top?”

“Oh, no, Father, I was just thinking about those events. The Fox sisters weren’t at school yesterday. Can you believe . . .”

“There is nothing to believe or to think about from this point of view!”

“It’s said that even Mr. Fox, who has a solid head, is telling stories in the village . . .”

The reverend had a moment of weariness. His face, paled from sleepless nights, turned a little more gaunt. But wanting to appear kind, he corrected the seated posture of his poorly stacked vertebra.

“That Christian man communes more fervently at the saloon than at the church. Alcohol and dominos will end up disorienting everyone, him as well as his peers. When they’re not busy fulfilling their blessed need, sinners have only one eagerness: to distance themselves from the divine light . . .”

Pearl, with the delicacy of an egret, was leaning with the tips of her fingers against the study table, casting the old man one of those heavenly blue stares beneath the shadow of her eyelashes.

“You are probably being too harsh on those poor farmers . . .”

Reverend Gascoigne considered his daughter with an inextricable feeling of annoyance, limitless affection, and profound melancholy: at a few years difference in age, Pearl so resembled Violet when she was a young mother, certainly in thought as well, her form of reasoning was more like protest, almost a reproach, a manner of systematic petition. He admitted without thinking it, deep down, that the mourning of his wife had burned away all true charity in him and hardened the cardiac tissue of his compassion, leaving only a bit of scar tissue for the potentialities of grace. Since his wife’s suicide, his status as a pastor flirted with imposture, yet he never departed from any of his priestly or civic duties. Pearl meanwhile carried on as if morality were still intact. Hadn’t her mother drowned by accident? She understood nothing of the insinuations and other derogatory claims around her. All the battles for freedom and equality written in the Gospel were hers. He suspected her participation in the network helping fugitive slaves, for she had never hidden her radical beliefs in emancipation, as much for blacks as for women. Pearl had a flawless energy and certainly the appearance of those beautiful slender angels papists like to paint. To whom would he marry such a phenomenon as herself in this land of swine? Before the cult of liberty, in the Ancient World, she would’ve ranked among the obstinate being dragged to execution on the racks of infamy . . . The reverend was annoyed by these absurd associations that kept bombarding the mind’s emptiness.

“Could you leave me to work on my sermon, I have to readjust the brains of a bunch of renegades gaining strength . . .”

“Why is it that you don’t believe them?” the mocking young woman confronted him, her eye of infinite blue landing on the knife of his mouth.

“In those stupid stories of knocking spirits? I adhere only to the Blessing of Jesus Christ!”

The reverend watched the outline of his daughter vanish in the shadow of the landing. She didn’t close the door behind her, and her laugh, turned toward invisible presences—undoubtedly her old long-haired Yorkshire tumbling down the staircase or the Mynah bird holding forth in the pulpit of his cage in the vestibule—reverberated back up to him, rendered almost unreal, like another time, long before unhappy Violet’s first attack of neurasthenia.

Forehead lowered over the Bible, he placed his head between his fists to hear no more of the world’s noises. Meditating on a sermon the night before delivering it was a respite for him, a break from his prosaic duty, which was either to entertain a mass of dolts and simpletons or to frighten children. A single ray of true light in these narrow minds could do more harm than a loaded revolver. How to grant them glimpses of the Lord’s ways? Since Luther, the Moravians, and the Holy Club, there was no other way to announce the Good News than by making the church thunder with horrors and curses. Outside or in the coalmines, mortals understand only the thunder of God, all of them blind to his lightning. Back in the day, John Wesley, founder of the Church, ran like Attila through the moors of England, reading and writing his sermons on horseback, the conquest of souls his exclusive ambition. In the haunted high plains of America, it was better to have to deal with masses of unbelievers or papists in favor of slavery than with a single necromancer.

Reverend Gascoigne leafed through his Bible. With the dexterity of a Monte card player, he flipped from the Pentateuch to the Book of Nahum, from Leviticus to the Proverbs. His finger rested without hesitation on the useful verse, echoing from countless homilies. And so the Eternal God said to Moses: “Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” And so the king of Manasseh offending the Eternal God placed Baal and Astarte in the Temple and immolated his own son; like the Philistines, he surrounded himself with sorcerers and false prophets.

“O house of Jacob, come you, and let us walk in the light of the Lord!” the pastor whispered.

Then, without reading anything more than folds of his memory:

“May you never find among you anyone who would put his son or daughter in the fire, no one who exercises the trade of diviner, astrologer, augur, magician . . . Enter into the rocks, and hide thee in the dust, so as to avoid God’s terror and the brightness of his majesty.”

Abruptly stopped short, he told himself that if the Prophets, great and minor, were all firmly diverted away from this funereal form of prostitution, it must be because they thought the gift of prophecy was wrong. Ending his arbitration, he exclaimed:

“And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits and after wizards, to go a whoring with them, I will set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.”

But what persons, falling into weakness, could be so demonic to have at heart the desire to rekindle the flames of hell? Closing his eyes, he took on a more assured voice:

“Rejoice in being alive and without sin, give to the Lord all authority and power over impure spirits!”

The reverend remembered King Saul in quest of a necromancer capable of intervening in God’s fierce deafness toward him. His servants found him a woman in Endor. In disguise, the king went to visit her and commanded: “Conjure someone from the dead in order to tell me the future.” The woman replied that it would be risking her life, for a royal decree forbade it, but Saul swore to protect her if she obeyed and asked her to make Samuel, the last Judge, come up from the kingdom of the dead. And the terrified woman said that she recognized Saul as her king, then: “I see a divine being, he comes back up from the earth!” But the old man wrapped in a cloak, the very man who during his life put Saul on the throne, did not want to respond to the king’s distress. Why wouldn’t a prophet no longer prophesize once deceased?

In a voice vibrant with indignation, the reverend exclaimed: “The horseman lifteth up both the bright sword and the glittering spear: and there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcasses; and there is no end of their corpses; they stumble upon their corpses . . .”

Then, more quietly, coming out of a daze: “No, the dead never answer the pleas of the living, except to announce the destruction of their kingdom! The dead are without memory and without love . . .”

The reverend lowered his voice again, confused. Orating up to this point in the Tower of Babel of his own thoughts, mingling Kings and Prophets, he now turned back on himself in vain exhortation, against his loneliness as a dried up widower, these verses of Ecclesiastes:

“Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun.”