Lives of Girls and Women (14 page)

The front door opened, Fern coming in.

“I could always send away for a box of Bibles.”

Just before Fern came in one door and Owen came in the other there was something in the room like the downflash of a wing or knife, a sense of hurt so strong, but quick and isolated, vanishing.

“There is an Egyptian god with four letters,” said my mother, frowning at the crossword, “that I know I know, and I cannot think of it to save my soul.”

“Isis.”

“Isis is a goddess, I'm surprised at
you
.”

Soon after this the snow began to melt, the Wawanash river over flowed its banks, and carried away road signs and fence posts and henhouses, and receded; the roads became more or less navigable, and my mother was out again in the afternoons. One of my father's aunts—it never matters which—said, “Now. She will miss her writing to the newspapers.”

Age of Faith

When we lived in that house at the end of the Flats Road, and before my mother knew how to drive a car, she and I used to walk to Town; Town being Jubilee, a mile away. While she locked the door I had to run to the gate and look up and down the road and make sure there was nobody coming. Who could there ever be, on that road, besides the mailman and Uncle Benny? When I shook my head no she would hide the key under the second post of the verandah, where the wood had rotted and made a little hole. She believed in burglars.

Turning our backs on the Grenoch Swamp, the Wawanash River, and some faraway hills, both bare and wooded, which though not ignorant of the facts of geography I did sometimes believe to be the end of the world, we followed the Flats Road which was not much more, at this end, than two wheel-tracks, with a vigorous growth of plantain and chickweed down the middle. My mind would be on burglars. I saw them black and white, with melancholy dedicated faces, professional clothes. I imagined them waiting somewhere not too far away, say in those ferny boggy fields along the edge of the swamp, waiting and holding in their minds the most exact knowledge of our house and everything in it. They knew about the cups with butterfly handles, painted gold; my coral necklace which I thought ugly and scratchy but had been taught to consider valuable, since it had been sent from Australia by my father's Aunt Helen on her trip around the world; a silver bracelet bought by my father for my mother before they were married; a black bowl with Japanese figures painted on it, very peaceful to look at, a wedding present; and my mother's greenish-white Laocoon inkwell awarded for highest marks and general proficiency when she graduated from high school—the
serpent so cunningly draped around the three male figures that I could never discover whether there were or were not marble genitals underneath. Burglars coveted these things, I understood, but would not move unless we gave them cause, by our carelessness. Their knowledge, their covetousness, made each thing seem confirmed in its value and uniqueness. Our world was steadfastly reflected in burglar minds.

Later on of course I began to doubt the existence of burglars or at least to doubt that they could operate in this manner. Much more likely, I saw, that their methods were haphazard and their knowledge hazy, their covetousness unfocused, their relationship to us next thing to accidental. I could go more easily up the river to the swamp when my belief in them had faded, but I missed them, I missed the thought of them, for quite a while.

I had never had a picture of God so clear and uncomplicated as my picture of the burglars. My mother was not so ready to refer to Him. We belonged—at least my father and my father's family belonged—to the United Church in Jubilee, and my brother Owen and I had both been baptized there when we were babies, which showed a surprising weakness or generosity on my mother's part; perhaps childbirth mellowed and confused her.

The United Church was the most modern, the largest, the most prosperous church in Jubilee. It had taken in all the former Methodists and Congregationalists and a good chunk of Presbyterians (that was what my father's family had been) at the time of Church Union. There were four other churches in town but they were all small, all relatively poor, and all, by United Church standards, went to extremes. The Catholic church was the most extreme. White and wooden, with a plain mission cross, it stood on a hill at the north end of town and dispensed peculiar services to Catholics, who seemed bizarre and secretive as Hindus, with their idols and confessions and black spots on Ash Wednesday. At school the Catholics were a small but unintimidated tribe, mostly Irish, who did not stay in the classroom for Religious Education but were allowed to go down to the basement, where they banged on the pipes. It was hard to connect their simple rowdiness with their exotic dangerous faith. My father's
aunts, my great-aunts, lived across from the Catholic church and used to make jokes about “nipping in for a bit of a confession” but they knew, they could tell you, all there was beyond jokes, babies' skeletons and strangled nuns under the convent floors, yes, fat priests and fancy women and the black old popes. It was all true, they had books about it. All true. Like the Irish at school, the church building seemed inadequate; too bare and plain and straightforward-looking to be connected with such voluptuousness and scandal.

The Baptists were extreme as well, but in a completely unsinister, slightly comic way. No person of any importance or social standing went to the Baptist Church, and so somebody like Pork Childs, who delivered coal and collected garbage for the town, could get to be a leading figure, an elder, in it. Baptists could not dance or go to movies; Baptist ladies could not wear lipstick. But their hymns were loud, rollicking and optimistic, and in spite of the austerity of their lives their religion had more vulgar cheerfulness about it than anybody else's. Their church was not far from the house we later rented on River street; it was modest, but modern and hideous, being built of grey cement blocks, with pebbled glass windows.

As for the Presbyterians, they were leftovers, people who had refused to become United. They were mostly elderly, and campaigned against hockey practice on Sundays, and sang psalms.

The fourth church was the Anglican, and nobody knew or spoke much about it. It did not have, in Jubilee, any of the prestige or money which attached to it in towns where there was a remnant of the old Family Compact, or some sort of military or social establishment to keep it going. The people who settled Wawanash County and built up Jubilee were Scotch Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists from the north of England. To be Anglican was therefore not fashionable as it was in some places, and it was not so interesting as being Catholic or Baptist, not even proof of stubborn conviction like being Presbyterian. However the church had a bell, the only church bell in town, and that seemed to me a lovely thing for a church to have.

In the United Church the pews, of glossy golden oak, were placed in a democratic fan-shaped sort of arrangement, with the pulpit and
choir at the heart of the fan. There was no altar, only a powerful display of organ pipes. The stained glass windows showed Christ performing useful miracles (though not the water into wine) or else they illustrated parables. On Communion Sunday the wine went round on trays, in little thick glass cups; it was like everybody having refreshments. And it was not even wine, but grape juice. This was the church the Legion attended, uniformed, on a certain Sunday; also the Lions Club, carrying their purple tasselled hats. Doctors, lawyers, merchants, passed the plate.

My parents went to church seldom. My father in his unaccustomed suit seemed deferential but self-contained. During the prayer he would put his elbow on his knee, rest his forehead on his hand, close his eyes, with an air of courtesy and forebearance. My mother, on the other hand, never closed her eyes a minute and barely inclined her head. She would sit looking all around, cautious but unabashed, like an anthropologist taking note of the behaviour of a primitive tribe. She listened to the sermon bolt upright, bright-eyed, skeptically chewing at her lipstick; I was afraid that at any moment she might jump up and challenge something. The hymns she ostentatiously did not sing.

After we rented the house in town we had a boarder, Fern Dogherty, who sang in the United Church choir. I would go to church with her, and sit by myself, the only member of our family present. My father's aunts lived at the other end of town and did not take this long walk often; the service was broadcast, anyway, over the Jubilee radio station.

Why did I do this? At first, it was probably to bother my mother, though she made no outright objection to it, and to make myself interesting. I could imagine people looking at me, saying afterwards, “Do you see that little Jordan girl there, all by herself, Sunday after Sunday?” I hoped that people would be intrigued and touched by my devoutness and persistence, knowing my mother's beliefs or nonbeliefs, as they did. Sometimes I thought of the population of Jubilee as nothing but a large audience, for me; and so in a way it was; for every person who lived there, the rest of the town was an audience.

But the second winter we lived in town—the winter I was twelve years old—my reasons had changed, or solidified. I wanted to settle the question of God. I had been reading books about the Middle Ages; I was attracted more and more to the idea of faith. God has always been a possibility for me; now I was prey to a positive longing for Him. He was a necessity. But I wanted reassurance, proof that He actually was there. That was what I came to church for, but could not mention to anybody.

On wet windy Sundays, snowy Sundays, sore-throat Sundays I came and sat in the United Church full of this unspeakable hope; that God would display Himself, to me at least, like a dome of light, a bubble radiant and indisputable above the modern pews, that He would flower suddenly as a bank of daylilies below the organ pipes. I felt I must rigidly contain this hope; to reveal it, in fervour of tone or word or gesture, would have been inappropriate as farting. What was chiefly noticeable in people's faces during the earlier, more God-directed parts of the service (the sermon tended to take off into topical areas) was a kind of cohesive tact, the very thing my mother offended against, with that cross inquiring look, as if she was going to pull up shortly and demand that everything make sense.

The question of whether God existed or not never came up in Church. It was only a matter of what He approved of, or usually of what He did not approve of. After the benediction there would be a stir, a comfortable release in the church as if everybody had yawned, though of course no one had, and people rose and greeted each other in a pleased, relieved, congratulatory way. I felt at such times itchy, hot, heavy, despondent.

I did not think of taking my problem to any believer, even to Mr. McLaughlin the minister. It would have been unthinkably embarrassing. Also, I was afraid. I was afraid the believer might falter in defending his beliefs, or defining them, and this would be a setback for me. If Mr. McLaughlin, for instance, turned out to have no firmer a grasp on God than I did, it would be a huge though not absolute discouragement. I preferred to believe his grasp was good, and not try it out.

However I did think of taking it to another church, to the Anglican church. It was because of the bell, and because I was curious to see what another church was like inside and how they went about things, and the Anglican was the only one it was possible to try. I did not tell anybody what I was doing, naturally, but walked with Fern Dogherty to the steps of the United Church, where we parted, she to go round to the vestry to get into her choir gown. When she was out of sight I turned and doubled back across town, and came to the Anglican church, in answer to the invitation of that bell. I hoped nobody saw me. I went in.

There was a storm porch set up outside the main door, to keep the wind out. Then a little cold entry with a strip of brown matting, hymn books piled on the window-ledge. I entered the church itself.

They had no furnace, evidently, just a space heater by the door, making its steady domestic noise. A strip of the same brown matting went across the back and up the aisle; otherwise there was just the wooden floor, not varnished or painted, rather wide boards occasionally springy underfoot. Seven or eight pews on either side, no more. A couple of choir benches at right angles to the pews, a pump organ at one side and the pulpit—I didn't know at first that was what it was— stuck up like a hen roost at the other side. Beyond that a railing, a step up, a tiny chancel. The floor of the chancel had an old parlour carpet. Then there was a table, with a pair of silver candlesticks, a baize-lined collection plate, and a cross which looked as if it might be cardboard covered with silver paper, like a stage crown. Above the table was a reproduction of the Holman Hunt painting of Christ knocking at the door. I had not seen this picture before. The Christ in it differed in some small but important way from the Christ performing miracles in the United Church window. He looked more regal and more tragic, and the background against which he appeared was gloomier and richer, more pagan somehow, or at least Mediterranean. I was used to seeing him limp and shepherdly in Sunday school pastels.

Altogether there were about a dozen people in the church. There was Dutch Monk the butcher and his wife and his daughter Gloria, who was in Grade Five at school. She and I were the only people under the age of forty. There were some old women.

I was barely in time. The bell had stopped ringing and the organ began to play a hymn, and the minister entered from the side door which must have led to the vestry, at the head of the choir, which was three ladies and two men. He was a round-headed cheerful-looking young man I had never seen before. I knew that the Anglican Church could not afford a minister all its own and shared one with Porterfield and Blue River; he must have lived in one of those places. He had snowboots on under his robes.

He had an English accent.

Dearly beloved brethren, the scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness ....