Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

  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 ....

  There was a board in front of each bench, to kneel on. Everybody slid forward, rustling open prayer books, and when the minister finished his part, everybody else began saying something back. I looked through the prayer book I had found on the shelf in front of me but I could not find the place, so I gave up and listened to what they were saying. Across the aisle from us, and one pew ahead, was a tall, bony old lady in a black velvet turban. She had not opened her prayer book, she did not need it. Kneeling erectly, lifting her chalky wolfish profile sky-ward—it reminded me of the profile of a Crusader’s effigy, in the encyclopedia at home—she led all the other voices in the congregation, indeed dominated them so that they were no more than a fuzzy edge of hers, which was loud, damp, melodic, mournfully exultant.

  … left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord.…

  And further along this line, and the minister took it up in his fine, harmonizing though perhaps more restrained English voice, and this dialogue continued, steadily paced, rising and falling, always with confidence, with lively emotion safely contained in the most elegant channels of language, and coming together, finally, in perfect quiet and reconciliation.

  Lord, have mercy upon us.

  Christ, have mercy upon us.

  Lord, have mercy upon us.

  So here was what I had not known, but must always have suspected, existed, what all those Methodists and Congregationalists and Presbyterians had fearfully abolished—the theatrical in religion. From the very first I was strongly delighted. Many things pleased me—the kneeling down on the hard board, getting up and kneeling down again and bobbing the head at the altar at the mention of Jesus’ name, the recitation of the Creed which I loved for its litany of strange splendid things in which to believe. I liked the idea of calling Jesus Jesu sometimes; it made Him sound more kingly and magical, like a wizard or an Indian god; I liked the IHS on the pulpit banner, rich ancient threadbare design. The poverty, smallness, shabbiness and bareness of the church pleased me, that smell of mould or mice, frail singing of the choir, isolation of the worshippers. If they are here, I felt, then it is probably all true. Ritual which in other circumstances might have seemed wholly artificial, lifeless, had here a kind of last ditch dignity. The richness of the words against the poverty of the place. If I could not quite get a scent of God then at least I could get the scent of His old times of power, real power, not what He enjoyed in the United Church today; I could remember His dim fabled hierarchy, His lovely mouldered calendar of feasts and saints. There they were in the prayer book, I opened on them by accident—saints’ days. Did anybody keep them? Saints’ days made me think of something so different from Jubilee—open mows and half-timbered farmhouses and the Angelus and candles, a procession of nuns in the snow, cloister walks, all quiet, a world of tapestry, secure in faith. Safety. If God could be discovered, or recalled, everything would be safe. Then you would see things that I saw—just the dull grain of wood in the floorboards, the windows of plain glass filled with thin branches and snowy sky—and the strange, anxious pain that just seeing things could create would be gone. It seemed plain to me that this was the only way the world could be borne, the only way it could be borne—if all those atoms, galaxies of atoms, were safe all the time, whirling away in God’s mind. How could people rest, how could they even go on breathing and existing, until they were sure of this? They did go on, so they must be sure.

  How about my mother? Being my mother, she did not quite count. But even she, when cornered, would say yes, oh yes, there must be something—some design. But it was no use wasting time thinking about it, she warned, because we could never understand it anyway; there was quite enough to think about if we started trying to improve life in the here and now for a change; when we were dead we would find out about the rest of it, if there was any rest of it.

  Not even she was prepared to say Nothing, and see herself and every stick and stone and feather in the world floating loose on that howling hopeless dark. No.

  The idea of God did not connect for me with any idea of being good, which is perhaps odd, considering all about sins and wickedness that I did listen to. I believed in being saved by faith alone, by some great grab of the soul. But did I really, did I really want it to happen to me? Yes and no. I wanted it to happen, but I saw it would have to be a secret. How could I go on living with my Mother and Father and Fern Dogherty and my friend Naomi and everybody else in Jubilee, otherwise?

  The minister spoke to me at the door in a breezy way.

  “Nice to see the good-looking young ladies out this nippy morning.”

  I shook his hand with difficulty. I had a stolen prayer book under my coat, held in place by my crooked arm.

  “Couldn’t see where you were in church,” Fern said. The Anglican service was shorter than ours, economizing on sermon, so I had had time to get back to the United Church steps to meet her when she came out.

  “I was behind a post.”

  My mother wanted to know what the sermon had bee
n about.

  “Peace,” said Fern. “And the United Nations. Et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Peace,” said my mother enjoyably. “Well, is he for it or against it?”

  “He’s all in favour of the United Nations.”

  “I guess God is too then. What a relief. Only a short time ago He and Mr. McLaughlin were all for the war. They are a changeable pair.”

  Next week when I was with my mother in the Walker Store the tall old lady in the black turban walked by, and spoke to her, and I was afraid she would say she had seen me in the Anglican Church, but she did not.

  My mother said to Fern Dogherty, “I saw old Mrs. Sherriff in the Walker Store today. She still has the same hat. It makes me think of an English bobbie’s.”

  “She comes in the Post Office all the time and creates a scene if her paper isn’t there by three o’clock,” Fern said. “She’s a tartar.”

  Then from a conversation between Fern and my mother during which my mother tried unsuccessfully to send me out of the room— she would do this as a kind of formality, I think, for once she had told me to go she did not bother much about whether I went—I learned that Mrs. Sherriff had had bizarre troubles in her family which either resulted from, or had resulted in, a certain amount of eccentricity and craziness in herself. Her oldest son had died of drink, her second son was in and out of the Asylum (this was what the Mental Hospital was always called, in Jubilee) and her daughter had committed suicide, drowning herself in fact, in the Wawanash River. Her husband? He owned a dry-goods store and was a pillar of the community, said my mother drily. Maybe he had syphilis, suggested Fern, and passed it on, it attacks the brains in the second generation, they were all hypocrites, those old boys with the stiff collars. My mother said that Mrs. Sherriff for many years wore her dead daughter’s clothes, around the house and to do the gardening in, until she got them worn out.