Mercy Seat

by Wayne Price

  She’s curious about me, it’s clear, and often meets my eye in the midst of a service, though I make sure to slip away before she can keep me in conversation. I did stay a little longer once, to thank her after a sermon had both puzzled and moved me. She’d taken a poem as her text – one of the lyrics in the voice of God in Rilke’s Book of Hours. ‘Nearby is the country they call life,’ she read, leaning forward eagerly, as she often does, as if she might one day launch herself from the tall oak pulpit. ‘You will know it by its seriousness.’

  The words reminded me, though I couldn’t say exactly why, of a scene in a film I’d watched once – something French – in a small art-house cinema during my time in London. I used to go there for the weekday matinees, knowing it would be almost deserted then, and would sometimes drift into sleep or lose myself in memories amongst the rows of empty seats. In the film there was a trial scene where the judge shouted out his charges and questions at a line of cowed prisoners. Then, because the prisoners’ belts had been confiscated in their cells, one of the men finds his trousers falling down, and is terrified. For an awful moment there’s nothing but silence. Then the judge begins to laugh. And soon the entire court – and the humiliated prisoner – is laughing helplessly too.

  Helpless – that was the thing. I remember standing and groping my way out of the cinema without watching the rest of the film. The day was bright and hot outside; dusty and roaring with mid-day traffic. It must have been deep into summer. I walked to a nearby park and sat on a bench until my heart stopped racing.

  I waited for her when the service ended, outside the porch, smoking a cigarette in the watery sun, nodding at the few old widows and widowers as they left. They each seemed a little startled to see me loitering in the brightness there.

  Oh. Hello, she said, when she finally appeared. I see you at the back there most Sundays, don’t I? But you never stay for introductions. She turned away briefly to lock the door, then faced me again with steady, pale green eyes and a bright, frank smile that seemed, in the friendliest of ways, to demand I explain myself.

  I quoted the lines of poetry to her. You spoke so well about most of the poem, I told her, smiling. But I was sitting there hoping you’d explain what those particular lines meant, and you didn’t. I can’t get them out of my head, and I’ve no idea why.

  Explain! she said, laughing. I’m a woman of the cloth. It wouldn’t be right for me to do anything as wicked as that to a poem.

  I laughed with her, and we shook hands and introduced ourselves a little shyly.

  I’m sorry, but I’m always here under false pretences, I told her. I’m not a believer. Not even agnostic. I just find it restful to listen to it all.

  She nodded decisively. I think that’s as good a reason as any for being here, she said. To be honest, you always look so gloomy in the shadows, I was thinking you must be some disapproving old diehard building up evidence for a quarrel. I get my fair share.

  Maybe you’ll convert me and I’ll become one.

  She laughed again, and I longed suddenly to find an excuse to keep her talking, but couldn’t think of anything beyond some clumsy, rushed invitation that would surely unnerve her, and the impulse passed as quickly as it had come. Well, listen, she said. I’m so glad we’ve spoken at last, but I must get going.

  Yes, I said. Of course.

  Honestly, I’m sorry – I’d love to talk. But I’ve an afternoon service in one the old folks’ homes in town today. Next week, maybe? She stepped lightly across the gravel toward her small blue car, pausing after opening its door to grin over her shoulder and wave. I watched her drive off and listened for the engine fading into silence before starting on the walk home.

  Soon enough, I know, she’ll be offered the chance to move on to some livelier mission in a town or city, with a youth group and a bustling congregation of liberal, like-minded souls. And when I think of that I wonder if I’ll begin my travels again then, too. But I doubt it. I belong here as much as I’ve ever belonged anywhere. This is where the world makes sense to me. Here I am.

  My mother had no religious convictions as far as I know, but of course I lost her before reaching the age when we might have quarrelled about such things. Once though, in the hospice, very near the end, half-waking from a morphine dream, she told me she’d seen the devil, with absolute clarity, and he was a small, distant figure, walking away from her. It wasn’t at all frightening, she wanted me to understand. He was walking away.

  Some of the more optimistic among the Reverend Bethell’s tiny flock believe in a personal God, and a personal Jesus. I prefer the thought of a personal Satan, not stinking of brimstone, more the cold scent of some stony beach, or winter fields before snow, or forestry tracks on some hillside in the rain. Where have you been? God asks him in the Book of Job. From going to and fro in the earth, he answers, and from walking up and down in it. My mother was right, I think: he always has his back to us, though we’d recognise him if he turned.

  Most Sundays, in the dead hours between morning and evening services, I make my way after lunch from the cool, damp cottage that for all its smallness is much too big for me and follow the farm tracks, between fields of staring sheep, to the cliffs above the sea. I stand on the bright grass that lies like a prayer rug – wind-clipped, smooth as baize – at the very lip of the long drop down to the waves. You can watch the white backs of the gulls below, wheeling to the limed twigs of their nests, or rising and riding out on the thermals. You can see, sometimes, the black, unmoving heads of seals, solitary, or in twos and threes, pinned there among the swells and troughs. And I think of Christine, treading water over a colder, more lonely and bottomless depth, years in that hospital bed. And the night I swam out, following and losing her, turning to see the world I’d left: the orange glow of the hidden town, and somewhere within it the brief miracles of my sleeping wife and child; the fossilled cliffs crouched in their own, almost animal dark; and everything lit by the lamps of a thousand long-dead stars.