The Life of Hope (14 page)

“Sowwy!” said George, louder and more miserably.

“We are dancing,” answered Hope. “Executing a small terpsichore. We are,” he proclaimed grandly, “being foolish.”

Martha set down her parcels on the table. “You’ve never danced with me,” she mentioned, and then her eyes lit on the heel of bread, the many crumbs and patches of butter. “George,” she said sternly, “you’ve been eating before supper.”

George was disconsolate. “Sowwy,” he moaned.

“You’ll have ruined your appetite,” Martha snarled.

“George is a grown man,” said Joseph Hope. “If anything, he is overly grown. I hardly think a little bread and butter takes up much room.”

Martha clenched her fist, even raised it into the air a little. Then she stuck it into one of her bags and came up with the mail delivery. “Here we are, Reverend Hope.” She spoke quietly. “We must do the Lord’s work.”

The mail was two pieces, one a letter, the other the latest edition of
The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War
. Joseph had little interest in the periodical, because he had contributed nothing to it himself. Lately his mind had been too full of Polyphilia to think of other things. Joseph was about to toss the magazine aside with a show of disdain when something caught his eye. T. D. ANNOUNCES WEDDING PLANS said a banner on the front page. “T. D.” was how Theophilius Drinkwater referred to himself within the pages of
The Battle-Axe
. Joseph held the newsprint close to his eye and read:

The date of the wedding was two weeks away.

“What’s the mattuh?” asked George gently.

Buford Scrope Davies was a man who, although he had all the mental propensities for insanity, lacked the moral courage to be outrageously insane like his mentor Theophilius. Hope seemed to recall that Davies was clubfooted and fat, some thirty years Polyphilia’s senior. Hope noticed that his little hands were shaking, badly in need of something to do. Joseph reached quickly for the letter, tearing it open. His eye devoured the message angrily. J. B. Hope (Joe no more) crumpled the letter and flung it away.

“What?” asked George.

Martha retrieved the letter, opened it out, and read. She then
summarized the contents for her twin brother. “It’s from the Association of the Eastern District of Massachusetts,” she said. “They have taken away the Reverend’s licence to preach.”

“By what wight?” screamed George. “On what gwounds?”

The grounds, as stated in the letter, were, “Intoxication. Consorting with prostitutes. Heretical thought.” The first charges stemmed from Hope’s period as a drunkard—although he hadn’t consorted with prostitutes in the physical sense, he had been guilty of talking to them, preaching at them. The heretical-thought charge, of course, was leveled against the concept of Perfectionism.

George Quinton found himself in tears.

“It doesn’t matter,” croaked Joseph. He was staring at
The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War
. “I have taken away their licence to sin, and yet they keep sinning. They have taken away my licence to preach. I will keep preaching.”

George Quinton understood that Joseph Benton Hope would never be foolish again.

Joseph Benton Hope did indeed continue to preach; what’s more, he upped the intensity of his message considerably. This drove away many of his followers, but others came to replace them.

Cairine McDiarmid was a small woman with coal-black hair and green eyes. Cairine always dressed in mourning, complete with a veil the color of midnight, a veil she lifted only when watching J. B. Hope. Cairine was thirty-one years old, and for the first while everyone felt a vast pity for the very young widow,
until it was discovered that she had never been married. The mourning clothes, Cairine McDiarmid explained with an accent more musical than music, were for the world in general. Cairine was a great one for prophecies of doom, and once started she would sing them endlessly. “
Wahr
larks abaht the earner,” Cairine would say, “an’ brooder shall roise against brooder!” Cairine had seen it all in her native land, and often told tales of unbelievable horror. She’d lost her entire family through murder, war and accident (any accident being, of course, a punishment from God) and she knew it was just a matter of time before this moral horror invaded the United States of America. And if by some miracle the country managed to avoid epidemic bloodshed, it would still suffer at His great hands because of the monumental spiritual decay.

Cairine McDiarmid cataloged many examples of insidious evil; huge factories where children worked from dawn until dusk, parties and dances where adolescents lost themselves in frenzied tribal ritual, plantations and farms where human beings were accorded less respect than dogs and horses because they happened to be black, elderly people cast out from society once they’d outlived their economic usefulness, aberrations a-plenty and lunatics everywhere, people who arrogantly meddled with God’s beautiful plan. Cairine had studied these people with scholarly thoroughness, and could quote them word for word.

Most of them dealt with the subject of sexual intercourse, which Cairine thought so simple a thing that only a fool would muck about with it. Still, there were any number of fools, fools like Robert Dale Owen, who in his book
Moral Physiology
advocated a practice he dubbed “coitus interruptus,” an unnatural and useless expenditure of seed, or fools like Charles Knowlton, who in his
Fruits and Philosophy
described various “douching” techniques designed to purge the seed as if it were some bit of slime, even fools who argued for abortion or
celibacy
.

Cairine McDiarmid couldn’t fully understand why God was allowing this all to happen, why He didn’t simply blast the planet from the sky and start over again somewhere else in the universe. The only answer she could come up with was that He meant to send His son Christ once more into the world, and Cairine had a hunch (she was born with a widow’s cowl, and
therefore second-sight) that He had already done so, and that Christ was Joseph Benton Hope.

Cairine had first attended the Perfectionist Free Church after reading in
The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War
that J. B. Hope’s licence to preach had been removed. The man must be doing something right, she told herself, and she donned her heavy mourning clothes and went to a service. At first she hadn’t been impressed—Hope was no more than a boy, really, at any rate far too young to possess any true knowledge. But as Hope spoke she found herself drawn into the words, and the words were wise and gracious. To say they made sense hardly did them justice, except if one took the phrase literally, that is, they constructed sense where once there was only chaos. Cairine was a bright woman, quick to spot hidden inconsistencies and contradictions, but Hope’s words flowed like a symphony, as unified and complementary as a work of Beethoven’s. If Hope’s thoughts sometimes struggled (as a melody might struggle with its counterpoint) it was only to attain a glorious resolution. Cairine felt her bosom swelling, a bosom that was already, by Cairine’s own reckoning, too large.

Then Hope began to move among the people, bouncing, thrashing with his arms. Cairine had attended more churches than she could recall, but the only time she’d seen anybody expend so much energy was at a Shaker service, and there the people had twitched convulsively, almost inhumanly. Hope was lithe and graceful, and Cairine discovered that she could tap her tiny toe in meter with his movements. That was when the notion of Christ and a Second Coming had first entered her mind, even though Hope looked nothing like the gaunt, golden-haired and bearded man that she’d been taught to worship. And she could no more imagine Christ dancing (that was what Hope was doing, plain and simple) than she could imagine Him, say, drinking a pint of dark ale and throwing darts. And, Cairine chuckled inwardly, if Hope was Christ and destined for a Cross, he wasn’t going without a fight.

By the time Hope had finished the service (Cairine had felt a brief pang of disappointment when she realized there would be no singing, for she had a lovely voice), Cairine McDiarmid was an avowed Perfectionist.

A collection was taken, two monstrously immense people, a man and a woman who looked exactly like the man, passing through the assembled. Cairine was sitting still, sweating slightly and basking in a reverie, a reverie that was snapped short when the giant man trod on her toe.

“Sowwy,” he mumbled.

Beside Cairine, Abram Skinner hid a small smile.

Abram Skinner was a man who had never doubted the existence of God. If a reason or proof had been demanded of him, Abram would have lit his pipe reflectively, spent many minutes laboriously thinking out the answer, and said, “Plant a seed. Watch it grow.” Abram Skinner had been performing this experiment for years, planting many seeds in long, neat rows, and marveling at their struggle Heavenward. Manifestations of Our Creator were everywhere, as far as Abram’s eyes could see; in the cycle of the seasons, in the sun and moon, even in the teats of his cows. Abram was still held in childlike awe by the teats of his cows; a few quick yanks, and milk issued forth. Furthermore, the milk could be easily rendered into butter and cheese. (Although his wife Abigal might argue with how easily the rendering could be done, she agreed with Abram in principle.)

What Abram wondered at was man’s place in this grand scheme of things. Man should be as glorious as a sunset, as magnificent as the moon. Instead, most men were small things with incoherent emotions, petty lusts and dreams. And, moreover, although Abram Skinner had seen a seed as tiny as a speck of dust become a tall, hearty plant, he had also seen Abigal give birth to four shriveled, lifeless husks. This was the mystery of life as far as Abram was concerned, why mankind should be so dysfunctional in a world of order and beauty.

So Abram had turned to religion, only to discover that religion dismissed things as they are, promising instead a better life in the hereafter. Abram wondered why. A man is given three score and ten years upon the earth, what purpose does it serve that they be miserable? The stock answer was, so that Heaven could serve as a reward. Abram’s rebuttal was that if the world served as some sort of testing ground, it was a contest in which Skinner had never asked to compete. God creates
flowers and asks nothing of them, He creates birds and yet never demands that they fly only as He wishes, and all the beasts of the world behave as they will, not according to a set of rules and regulations designed to earn them happiness after death. No, Abram simply wasn’t having it. The world was a beautiful thing, and Abram Skinner was determined to take his place there.

Abigal Skinner felt much the same way, although she hadn’t given it as much thought as her perpetually brooding husband. All Abigal knew was, at twenty-nine she had delivered stillborn babies four times and miscarried twice. Something was very, very wrong.

How the Skinners came to Hope was as follows: Abigal’s mother, a somewhat elderly widow woman, was a “Theophilian,” this being the term that had lately been applied to adherents of T. Drinkwater’s various philosophies. According to Abram, the old woman had become Theophilian only to keep herself occupied, for staying up to date with Drinkwater’s various theories and ideas was a fulltime occupation. Abram Skinner, at this point in his life disdainful of any religion, would have nothing to do with his mother-in-law. Abigal, being more sentimental, made a weekly trip to Boston for a visit. On one such visit, Abigal discovered her mother engaged in a very singular activity, that is, racing throughout the house with empty Mason jars held aloft, sealing them tightly and neatly stacking them in a corner. Abigal’s mother had a collection of thirty to forty empty and sealed Mason jars. Abigal was not alarmed by the fact that her mother was naked as she did this; the old woman had given up clothes months ago, as per Theophilius’s instructions. Abigal was alarmed, though, by the fact that the task was both apparently useless and obviously strenuous. Abigal’s mother was sweating profusely, it being somehow of great necessity that her charges be made full-tilt, the Mason jar held as high as her arms would allow.

“Mother,” asked Abigal, “what are you doing?”

Abigal’s mother was too out of breath to answer, and at any rate didn’t seem willing to stop what she was doing, so she thrust a copy of
The Battle-Axe & Weapons of War
at her daughter and launched off once more.

On the front page T. D. announced, much as he might have announced a picnic or a raffle, that he wanted all of his Spiritual Brethren to collect air in Mason jars (Theophilius stressed the importance of gathering the air from as high a level as possible, the air near the ground being more used and often malodorous) as he was planning an expedition to the moon.

Abigal was a sensible person and understood that the notion of bottled air was ill-conceived. Remarkably, the planned expedition to the moon struck Abigal as an exhilarating prospect, and some small part of her wondered if she’d be allowed to go along. She briefly imagined herself and Abram living on the moon, and it seemed right, the bleak terrain (Abigal pictured a world of mountains, silver seas and wispy gray clouds) somehow suiting her husband’s poetical moods. Abigal wondered what crops would do well on the moon, and she imagined that hearty grains might, might in fact do fabulously well; she envisioned a field of wheat that had grown to a height of thirty feet. Their children would do well there, too. Abigal had no knowledge of gravity or atmosphere, but she intuited that growth on the moon would be somehow unhindered, that their sons and daughters would be glorious giants.