In the Beauty of the Lilies (7 page)

“This unseasonable muggy spell has got us all down. My wager is you’ll be up and about within a week or two.”

“Ah, don’t talk foolishness, sir, in trying to be kind. I’m nearing the end, and I’m ready to face the verdict. Reverend Wilmot, tell me true now. The time for soft talk is by. What do you think my chances are, to find myself among the elect?”

The little face in the pillow emitted an odor of dental rot and stale mucus that afflicted Clarence’s nose six feet away, though the ward was perfumed with alcohol and ether. “In all frankness,” he said as gravely as he could, into the small monkeyish face, “I should estimate your chances to be excellent. Have you, in the course of your life as best you can remember, ever enjoyed a palpable experience of the living Christ?” Clarence’s mouth felt dry, dragging forth this old formula, with its invitation to hallucination and hysteria.

Mr. Orr’s eyes had forced wider apart the enclosing folds of skin; the bleached circlets of his irises were aswim in yellowish rheum threaded with blood. “I cannot honestly recollect ever enjoying that. I’ve searched my heart, but it’s hard to say,
now, isn’t it? Some of these women, they boast of the Lord as if He comes to pay court every night. I’ve had what you might call promptings, during prayer and on rare occasion in the middle of the day, while about business of another sort. But I wouldn’t want to make claims for them as palpable experiences. A palpable experience, I guess you’d have no doubt—isn’t that so?”

He had struck a note of sly wheedling that brought home to Clarence the cruelty of a theology that sets us to ransacking our nervous systems for a pass to Heaven, even a shred of a ticket. “You’re too modest, Mr. Orr. Anyway, some among us teaching elders hold that there can
be
no palpable experience—just the impalpable experience of existing in God’s grace, won anew by His Son Jesus Christ.”

The silence that greeted this was perhaps longer than Clarence imagined it. Then Orr said, “Well, if I’m not to be among the saved, it was laid down that way at the beginning of Creation, and what can a body do? Tell me, sir. What can we poor bodies down here do?”

Clarence was taken aback; dying was making the man conversationally ruthless. “What we can do, Mr. Orr, is to do good to our fellow man and trust in the Lord and enjoy His gifts when they are granted to us. I don’t see how any deity can ask more of us than that.”

Orr closed one eye, as if to sharpen his vision from the other. “You don’t. Is that right? You talk like it’s six of one and a half-dozen of the other. We’re not dealing here with any deity, we’re dealing with the true and only God. He asks the world and then some.”

Clarence thought to respond, but his voice was slow to come, and the withered little laborer, opening both eyes, went on challengingly: “Reverend Wilmot, my life’s been
hard. I never had advantages. I never thought I had enough to spare to take a wife, though there were several that were willing, when I was young and able. Having put up with a hard life for sixty-six years, without much comfort in it but hope of the next, I’m not afraid to face the worst. I’ll take damnation in good stride if that’s what’s to come.”

“Oh come now, Mr. Orr!—there can be no question of your damnation.”

“No, sir? No question. And why would that be?”

Clarence weakly gestured, unable politely enough to frame his impression that Mr. Orr was not worth the effort, the effort of God’s maintaining and stoking and staffing an eternal factory of punishment.

The man’s suspicions were aroused; he repeated the scrabbling effort of his elbows to raise himself in bed. “Damnation’s what my parents brought me up to believe in. They were regular pious folk, from Sussex County. There’s the elect and the others, damned. It’s in the Bible, over and over, right out of Jesus’ mouth. It makes good sense. You can’t have light without the dark. How can you be saved, if you can’t be damned? Answer me that. It’s part of the equation. You can’t have good without the bad, that’s why the bad exists. That’s what my parents held—pious folk, good people, lost their pig farm to the banks in the Panic of ’73, never got their heads above water since. Every night, before supper, we used to sing a hymn. Even nothing on the table, we used to sing a hymn. ‘Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh.’ That sort of thing. So tell me, Reverend Wilmot, where’s the flaw in my reasoning? You’re a learned man—that comes across real clear, Sunday mornings.”

Clarence had had such conversations before, but usually they were abstract, amiable disputes among professionals of
the faith; laymen on their deathbeds he had generally found modest and mannerly, anxious not to embarrass the minister of God come to offer rote comfort, their thoughts absorbed by their bodily upheavals and their final arrangements with loved ones. He sensed that Orr was terrified, and he knew that even as recently as yesterday he would have had stronger answers for him. But he forced out the words. He said, “You’ve left God’s infinite mercy out of the equation, Mr. Orr—there’s the flaw. Jesus spoke of Hell and outer darkness but He only condemned devils to it for certain, and who of us can claim to be a devil? Who would be so proud? God showed Man His love twice—when He created him out of clay and when He gave His only begotten Son to redeem him from Adam’s sin. In the Old Testament, we read how He loved Israel, His chosen people, even when they strayed. Don’t bother yourself about damnation, I beg you, my good friend, but think instead of the glorious Resurrection and life everlasting. Think of the thief on the cross, to whom Jesus said, ‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ Not that the state of your health is comparable to the thief on the cross. You’ve got a peck of years left in you, I can tell by your argumentative spirit. You’re on the mend. You’ll be back in your pew under the Reformers’ windows before we know it.”

The dying man turned his ashen, shrivelled face to study his comforter. “Don’t you believe in damnation at all?” he asked.

“Me myself? Absolutely I do. Without a doubt, absolutely. But not for you, Mr. Orr. Not for as hard a worker and as faithful a churchgoer as you. Certainly as a matter of abstract doctrine there has to be a state of non-election. And—who knows?—there may well be in the world men wicked enough to be eternally damned.”

“Them Oriental potentates with all the jewels and wives,” Mr. Orr offered.

“Exactly.”

“And all the Jews.”

“I can’t go along with that, I fear. Our Savior was a Jew. One of the most outstanding men in Paterson, Nathan Barnet, is a Jew.”

Mr. Orr closed his repulsive pained eyes, and sang in a voice surprisingly high and true, “ ‘Shadows of the evening, steal across the sky.’ ” Clarence imagined, with relief, that his presence had been forgotten, but Orr’s eyes opened again and he announced, “I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you
were
saying, Reverend. I couldn’t figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were dodging here and there. A lot of talk about compassion for the less fortunate, I remember that. Never a healthy sign, to my way of thinking, too much fuss and feathers about the poor. They’re with us always, the Lord Himself said. Wait till the next go-around, if the poor feel so sorry for themselves on this. The first shall be last. Take away damnation, in my opinion, a man might as well be an atheist. A God that can’t damn a body to an eternal Hell can’t lift a body up out of the grave either.”

“Mr. Orr, to relieve your mind—”

“Young man, don’t worry about relieving
my
mind. I told you, I can face it. I can face the worst, if it was always ordained. God’s as helpless in this as I am.”

“Well, now, that’s just it, isn’t it? How can a God be considered helpless—”

“If He’s made His elections at the beginning of time, He is. He can’t keep changing His mind. I guess that’s something He can’t do. Well, in a few days I’m going to know what His
mind was and is. I’d promise to tell you from the other side, but I’m no Spiritualist. There’s this side, and then there’s the other, just like there’s saved and not saved. You take counsel with yourself, Reverend Wilmot, and see if you can’t think a bit more kindly of damnation. To tell a man he can’t be damned has logical consequences you haven’t taken into account. There have to be losers, or there can’t be winners. That’s what the Bible tells us, and Mr. Herbert Spencer too.”

“That’s an arresting connection,” Clarence said, startled for the moment out of his profound discomfort.

“I’ve given things some thought,” Mr. Orr said, not without pride. “I’ve had no missus and a lot of lonely nights to do some pondering and a little reading. All the modern thinkers have come around to it—a lot of losers, a few winners. Eternal damnation it has to be, if there’s any sense to any of it at all. Mark my words.”

“I have and will, Mr. Orr. I wish you well. Forgive me”—he gratefully stood, lifting his thin, tilted, handsome head away from this foul deathbed into a level of atmosphere smelling of ether and antisepsis—“if I can’t quite believe damnation is for you. Maybe more for the likes of me. I can see the signs of election sparkling right in your eyes.”

The little man as if spitefully closed them, leaving his caller gazing down at a shrivelled yellow death mask.

Some weeks later, when that debilitating onset of June heat had settled into a daily drone of July temperatures in the nineties, the cycle of the lectionary had brought round, to the tenth Sunday after Pentecost, the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, the parable of the tares:

As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world
.

The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather
out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity;

And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth
.

Attendance was sparse; the gentry of the congregation would be enjoying with their families the breeze and waves of the Jersey shore or the heights of the Catskills, and those unable to afford summer homes or rentals would have trooped by mid-morning to the shaded picnic groves of Garrett Mountain. Clarence, mounted into the pulpit through the skeleton choir’s wavering “Amen,” looked toward the left wall and was sorry to see that Mr. Orr’s round, implacable, attentive face was gone, forever gone, from beneath the translucent row of unsmiling Reformers. The minister had meditated hard upon this sermon, to please the dead man. Feeling the plain black Geneva gown upon him as a gentle, inhibiting weight of consecration, and aware at his throat of the encasement of the upright wing collar which he wore, with a white bow tie, in modern echo of the traditional clerical bands, he faced the upturned faces scattered through the varnished pews. Paper fans imprinted with oily Biblical scenes methodically beat back and forth in front of these sweating, courteously expectant faces. He commenced in a quiet, factual voice, “The notorious agnostic Robert Ingersoll, whose imprecations did so much to arouse and refortify the church of my father’s generation, once began an essay as follows:

“ ‘One great objection to the Old Testament is the cruelty said to have been commanded by God. All these cruelties ceased with death. The vengeance of Jehovah stopped at the tomb. He never threatened to punish the dead; and there is not one word, from the first mistake in Genesis to the last curse of Malachi, containing the slightest intimation that
God will take his revenge in another world. It was reserved for the New Testament to make known the doctrine of eternal pain. The teacher of universal benevolence rent the veil between time and eternity, and fixed the horrified gaze of man upon the lurid gulf of hell. Within the breast of nonresistance coiled the worm that never dies. Compared with this, the doctrine of slavery, the wars of extermination, the curses, the punishments of the Old Testament were all merciful and just.’ ”

Stella and the three children—hard-mouthed Jared and fair-haired Esther looking superior if not quite sneering, soft-bodied Teddy gazing with that aggravating undercurrent of fright—were seated in the front pew, and Mr. and Mrs. Dearholt, having elected for this weekend to stay and roast in Paterson, were behind them, with four empty pews intervening. Dearholt’s oval glasses flashed; his wide wife wore a ghost of a deferential smile behind her dotted veil. Clarence had captured the congregation’s attention. He had knotted his straitjacket; now to get out of it, like the great Houdini.

“What might we say to this fierce indictment? That there is pain and brutality in the Bible, no one denies; it describes Mankind, and pain is a fact of human existence. The God of the Old Testament did not distance Himself from His chosen people; He participated in their struggles and made Israel’s enemies His own. Israel’s own transgressions grieved Him and incited Him to a terrible wrath. Ours is no aloof Lord—no Buddha beyond it all or Zeus making light of mortal travail. Among the world religions Christianity is unique in presenting a suffering God, a God who took human suffering upon Himself and in His agony gave birth to mankind’s salvation. He defeated death, which means He had to lay His hands upon death, as the Old Testament Jehovah laid hands
upon Jacob and wrestled with him all the night long. We do not worship a God immensely above us, out of human reach, but One Who does not disdain to touch us, to lay even rough hands upon us, and in that brief Lifetime recounted in the New Testament to descend to our condition, and to speak to men in metaphors drawn from their daily lives.

“For what does a farmer
do
with tares, with weeds? He
burns
them, to keep his fields tidy and to destroy those weed seeds, which otherwise would find fertile soil and bring forth in the next season a crop of weeds greater than ever. The economy of agriculture demands selection, demands winnowing. Earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, John the Baptist announces to Judea’s generation of vipers, ‘Every tree which bringest not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.’ One greater than he, John the Baptist announces, will come and ‘baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’