Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  After that he more or less abandoned notions of eating and gave himself over to sleep. All the telegraph poles were the same height, and their wires rose and fell with the terrain like a drawn-out strand of music. By now the earth was covered with snow and ice, as though they were travelling backwards into winter. The light changed and then changed again as the train hurtled along, but the forest was always the same; every time he opened his eyes it was to see, like a persistent dream, the same rock face and the same ragged column of spruce. Then, when even the trees fell away for a time and there was only rock, something began to squeeze his chest. The feeling did not go away when the forest resumed but squeezed tighter and tighter. When they stopped at Port Arthur he walked down the cinder track and into the woods and knelt on the snow (something he had never done before, he’d never knelt on snow) and coughed out some tears as though a nasty bit of phlegm had caught in his throat. It was clear to him that he was not equal to this country and he couldn’t imagine how his parents could have chosen to send him.

  The train station in Winnipeg was a vaulted cathedral. The men abandoned the train in a rush, leaving behind a litter of sausage rinds, whisky bottles, rabbit pelts, cigar stubs and spent shells, and pestered the staff for their luggage. But all the luggage was on the fifth train, they were told. Boris, with shockingly bloodshot eyes, came down the platform to tell my father that he was going off with some of the others to see the town. My father stayed at the station because he wanted to see Joe. The next two trains came in one after another about four hours later and stopped only briefly. There was a huge press of people, not just the colonists bound for the Britannia Colony who wanted to get off to stretch their legs but regular passengers boarding other trains going east and west. My father searched up and down the platform, but he did not see Joe. He did see the girl he’d watched on the ship, standing on the little stage between two cars as the third train pulled out. She was wearing her green travelling costume and as she was carried past my father she absently collected her hair with her hands, lifting it and twisting it into a knot on the back of her head. Her eyes slid over him and her expression didn’t change.

  Close to nightfall porters dumped the luggage from the last train onto the platform. My father spent several hours digging through it, moving methodically from one end of the platform to the other, turning tags from tin trunks up to the yellow light from the windows of the station. Boris appeared and said, “Give it up. We’ll look in the morning.” They walked through the station and out onto the street. The conductor had given them the name of a hotel down the street from the station, the Occidental, and Boris had already secured a room. At the hotel Boris asked for the key and they climbed three flights of stairs and went down a passage to a little room with two cots. “I’ll be in the beer parlour with the lads,” he said, dumping his knapsack on one of the cots. “Don’t you go havin’ one of them fits.”

  The next morning the cold in the room woke him. Boris was lying on his back on top of the blanket, breathing heavily, still wearing his boots. My father tied up his knapsack and closed the door quietly and went down the three flights of stairs to the lobby. At the desk he asked to pay his bill. Then he walked out onto the street. He turned south onto a wooden sidewalk, stopping two or three times to read notices in win dows and on lamp poles. The streets were full of people, and the unfamiliar hats they were wearing and the babble of languages they were speaking told him that Isaac Barr’s cause was already lost. When he got to the corner of Portage Avenue and Main Street he turned west. If he went east the sun would be in his eyes, so he went west.

  6

  In the summer an evangelistic crusade rolls into town. It’s a tired remnant of the tent revivals in the States, leftover stock being sold off cheap in Canada. I am ripe for the plucking. I fancy myself daring and audacious, I have broken my mother’s heart. But half the things I say and think come out of the books on the one narrow shelf at the Nebo School (My life is a graveyard of buried hopes, You don’t know how utterly wretched I am, etc.), books I no longer have access to, and when it comes right down to it, on the day of my most dramatic transgression I left Russell Bates and climbed into Mr. Tandy’s truck without a word of protest. I am neither one thing nor the other, and something in me has been weeping since the day the cattle were lost down by the river. I long to be sprung from the trap of who I am. Born again might be a term for it.

  At the same time I am appalled at the thought — of it happening to me on their terms. And so of course it is bound to, isn’t it, or how would it be what it needs to be: renunciation, capitulation, surrender, all my righteousness as filthy rags? My being saved is bound to be as banal as it can be, bound to happen in a tent set up at the fairgrounds and at the hands of a West Virginian named Wesley Moore, who has had a call directly from God, which in his particular case happened one day when he was riding on a ferry in New York harbour and took up a pair of binoculars to look at the Statue of Liberty and saw tears coursing down her stone cheeks, tears for the stench of sin that rose from that great land. A middle-aged man with blurred features and the suit and shoes of a gangster and a way of adding a syllable to the end of every second word (Prayin-ah, and testifyin-ah, and bearin’ witness to God-uh), and a way of seeking out individuals and fixing them with a hooded gaze while we all hunch on backless plank benches in front of him, benches so raw the sap is oozing from the knotholes.

  There I am in my yellow dress in a row of girls, the Stalling sisters and my Gilmore cousins. During the hymns I stand looking around to see what Burnley boys have come to the crusade, looking for things to mock. All the hymns are about blood, lamb’s blood: wading through fountains of it, or being washed in it. My mother is directly behind me, her anxiety drifting forward and settling damply on the back of my neck. Not just about me. She is rigid with fear that the Pentecostals will take it too far, disgrace us in the eyes of the town by falling into babbling fits, or hobble up on stage and mention some unspeakable disease to do with their inner organs, or try to cast the devil out of one another. During the sermon Wesley Moore paces back and forth, fondling the fine leather cover of his Bible, moving his hand intimately through its pages the way he might when he reads alone at night, building to his climax. He is a dab hand at the bait and switch, first getting people to slip their hands up privately if they want him to pray for them (You there, I see that hand, bless you, God bless you) and then, while his otherworldly wife at the piano diverts us seamlessly into the altar call, cajoling his victims out into the aisle. Mr. Gorrie the druggist stands at the side also facing in the wrong direction, watching the crowd through his dark glasses, like a marshal hired to prevent people escaping. The endless verses of “Just As I Am” run slower and slower and I crank my head right around and look shamelessly behind me. I want to see the faces of people coming up the aisle, I want to see the horror of their secret sins: how people look when they say, I’m not who you think I am, say it to the whole town. But on their faces is only resolve and caution, embarrassment, as though they’ve been called up to the stage as volunteers and can’t see an easy way out of it. Betty Stalling slips past me and goes forward, her curtain of shining hair hanging down her back. She’s done this once before, she was saved in church last summer. I recall this and a superior smile takes hold of my mouth.

  Women come and hold a prayer meeting in our living room. I am not invited — it is clear they mean to pray for me. What Mr. Dalrymple said about me so long ago, it is still there in everybody’s mind. I begin to feel eyes on me all the time: not Wesley Moore’s, or God’s, but my mother’s, always on me with a fervent look, even when she is turned away kneeling in the garden. Bugger off, I whisper, and a small dark figure in my imagination creeps up and sinks sharp fingers into the white of her throat, into her skin white as a puffball, and then runs off into the bush, wiping the stink of her off its fingers. Standing by the bunkhouse witnessing this scene I think I will faint.

  The fact is, I am ill and frightened that summer and
have been for some time. I have started to bleed intermittently, my private parts are bleeding, or, more accurately, it is coming from inside me, at first just a little but lately profusely, so that I have to use a ripped-up towel to keep blood from seeping into my clothes. I’ve started having pains in my stomach as well. When I am having one of these spells the terror of my impending death fills me and I throw my blankets off in the night and will myself out of bed to tell my mother, but in the face of all that appalling blood I never can. Even when it goes away the dark knowledge of it lies like a stone in my stomach.

  During the tent meetings I sense I am in for another bout of it. Night comes and steals away my daytime way of seeing things. A flaming scene materializes against the wall of my bedroom, cast there in shadows by the crocheted border of my curtain: roiling human figures in hell, thin, anguished creatures with arms and legs grotesquely stretched. All the talk about blood, I understand then, is a code meant specifically for me. On the path to the outhouse I am clamped by a fit of crying. Oh God, oh God, oh God, I cry as though I’ve just burned my hand on the stove. They all have a truth I can’t deny: something is deeply wrong with me. It isn’t the way I behave, it isn’t the movie or Russell Bates with his flask of liquor, nothing as simple as that. It is the sin of being who I am.

  In the meeting I sit between Gracie and Betty Stalling. Gracie has a pencil. She writes in the front of the hymnbook and tips it towards me: His wife wears the same dress every night. I push the hymnbook back at her and she closes it, hurt. On my other side Betty turns her face towards me. Tears swell in her eyes. My restless prickling legs have stilled. A familiar pain has started in my back, risen up from the hard, rough plank and seized hold of my legs and hips, clamping me to the bench.

  And why have you come to the Lord’s tabernacle tonight? Wesley Moore cries. Why are you sitting among the Lord’s anointed? You have come to mock! You have come to sneer! You sneer at the precious love of Jesus-uh. Do you think God is blind-uh? God is not blind-uh! God knows your heart! I half close my eyes, so that his pacing figure blurs. I would plug my ears if I could do it without drawing attention to myself. Since the Crusade began I’ve been thinking about Christian, of his brave and honest heart. I am weary of my inner sickness, he said. Where is The Pilgrim’s Progress? I asked my mother that afternoon. Oh, she said. I threw it out a long time ago. It had all fallen apart.

  Betty sits too close to me. The music starts up, Sister Adele’s soft, lavish playing. I wish I could see my dad — I don’t know where he’s sitting. The Lord knows your heart, your selfish heart. Bring it up and lay it on the altar-uh! Betty looks at me with her lashless, red-rimmed eyes. Go on, she says. I’ll go with you. They begin to sing. Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me. Sobs shake my chest. Suddenly I’m standing. We push our way down the row, past Gracie, getting briefly tangled in someone’s crossed legs. At the aisle I feel a huge up-swell of revulsion and terror and I jerk my arm free of her hand. I turn, turn and run towards the back of the tent. Faces lift, eyes open. Come home, come ho-o-ome, they sing with dreadful tenderness. I scuttle out of the tent, dodging the guy ropes, and stumble across the field, across the soft dirt of the racetrack to the grass on the other side. Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn, I moan, casting myself on the ground, feeling the prickly weeds under my bare palms, working my fingers into a crack the drought made in the earth. Oh no, no, no, I cry. Tears pour from my face onto the dust. I seem to see smoke issuing from a crack in the ground. I’m blind with humiliation and longing and self-disgust.

  Someone’s bending over me, someone has followed me. Not Betty Stalling. It’s Mr. Gorrie, his knees creaking and his thighs bulging like saddlebags when he crouches beside me. I roll over on the grass and sit up. I see eyes behind his tinted spectacles, small round eyes looking at me knowingly, like fish through glass.

  You might as well get it over with, he says. The Lord is not going to leave you alone until you do.

  The roof of the tent has disappeared against the dark sky: the only light anywhere is the shining yellow band from the kerosene lamps hanging along the sides of the tent. I pull back from his outstretched hand and get up on my own. The air is cool on my wet cheeks. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and brush off my skirt. By then they’re singing, Just as I am without one plea but that Thy blood was shed for me, and that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee… Oh lamb of God, I come, I come, the voices of people I know, each one lifting alone and all of them swelling together. I hear loveliness and longing in the simple melody.

  Mr. Gorrie takes me by the elbow and I let myself move with him. We walk slowly towards the figures of the singers silhouetted against the light. We are pilgrims approaching the Celestial City. At the edge of the tent we duck our heads to enter and start up the aisle, where other feet have worn a path in the grass. He drops his hand, but he stays with me all the way to the front. We walk side by side all the way up the long aisle between the rows of singers and then across the open space before the stage, where the ground is littered with the bodies of moths that have battered themselves to inevitable death on the lamps strung across the front of the tent. There we stand among all the other penitents who have come forward, stand with our heads bowed while everyone sings, Oh lamb of God, I come, I come.

  And so she is born again. Mr. Gorrie hands her over to Mr. Dalrymple, who is the one who leads her to the Lord. They sit on a bench set for that purpose on the grass behind the stage and Mr. Dalrymple reads her a few Bible verses, although afterwards she can’t remember which ones. He’s indifferent to the impulse that drew her forward — he’s not interested in anything particular she might say, he knows young girls. Her voice is thick and stupid and when he says, Let’s bow our heads and pray, she sits stupidly until he says the first line of a prayer and asks her to repeat it, Dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (Dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ), I come to you tonight admitting I am a sinner (I come to you tonight admitting I am a sinner), a whole long prayer line by line like marriage vows. Perhaps she should know how to pray after all those years in church, but she feels as though her mind has been wiped clean. That, she suddenly understands, is as it must be.

  Her parents and brother are waiting for her outside the tent. Phillip looks stonily in another direction, her father smiles at her quickly and then calls a comment to another man, one of his rare, nervous, overreaching efforts at jocularity (not about his daughter going forward but about the prospect of getting the Ford out of the parking lot), Betty and the other girls watch her shyly. Her mother clasps her waist in such a tender way that the girl sees that it was her all along, her own rebellion and outrageousness that made Mother the sort of mother she was, and that this surrender now frees her to be the sort of mother she can be.

  When they drive into the yard Joe Pye is sitting by the side of the house smoking. He gets up and he and Dad go to the barn. Mother follows her into her bedroom as though that room and everything the girl is are now open to her. She is carrying the Bible and she sets it down on the bureau and gazes at the girl and says, Oh, you don’t know how hard I’ve been praying for this day!

  Then she smiles glowingly and says, Just a minute, and darts back down the hall. When she returns she’s carrying the inkpot and pen. She sits down on the bed and opens the Bible to the front page, where someone in England has written, The Lord Watch Between Me And Thee While We Are Absent One From Another. She passes the inkpot to the girl to hold, and steadying the Bible on her knee she writes, Welcomed into the fold, July 6, 1933, and signs, Lily Piper. She shows it to the girl and the girl is astonished to see above it the inscription Welcomed into the fold, May 14, 1931. Phillip Piper.

  Then she says, Let’s pray together, Lily. There is so much true gladness in her voice, her face is so happy that the girl feels something breaking deep inside her stomach, shards of ice or spun sugar, and she begins to cry and turns her face into the front of her mother’s dress, into a place where she has no memory of it ever being before, alt
hough it must have been there often when she was a little child. Her tears magnify the white bone of her mother’s buttons and splash down in dark stains onto her mother’s dress and a light, bright place opens inside her. This is the joy they talk about, flowing like a river.

  Around her mother Lily is safe, for Mother knows exactly what she should do. On Saturday afternoons when the cleaning is done they bake angel food cake, for if there is something they have it is eggs. Mother measures out the flour and sugar, and Lily beats the egg whites by hand into glossy peaks, beating until the muscles in her arm burn. Mother knows when the eggs are stiff enough, she knows exactly what Lily should do, task by task. God is their commander and Mother is his lieutenant. Or Lily is a tightrope walker and Mother is her partner, standing on the other side of the tent and holding Lily’s eye intently to keep her from looking at her feet, to keep her from falling. You are one of us now, Mother’s expression says.

  At church people smile at Lily. Mrs. Feazel clasps her hand and says, I’m so happy, and Lily likes her for it. Then Mrs. Stalling, Betty’s stepmother, her eyeglasses glinting and the smell of raw onion on her breath, comes and clamps one arm around Lily and says, Well, at last! Thank the Lord! By then Lily’s smile has frozen on her face and she knows that Mrs. Stalling is testing her and sees her smile for what it is, false. Oh, it is so hard. Her good self is a starved little creature, she can hardly call up a sense of it. It’s like tuning the dial of Joe Pye’s radio to find KLS in Salt Lake City or WHP Des Moines, patiently combing for a break in the static, for the tiny voice you hope is out there somewhere.

  Her dad sends her to the drugstore to get liniment for Joe Pye. When she walks up to the counter Mr. Gorrie looks at her and up close like that she can see through his dark glasses a keen proprietorial eye. Every time he says, in a voice that speaks of the hidden depths within his question, How are you, Laura? He doesn’t even know her name! It is strange that Wesley Moore, whom she sees to be a charlatan, and Mr. Dalrymple, whom she sees to be a sour and nasty old man, and Mr. Gorrie, whom she sees to be a misfit in any society he chooses to associate himself with, were the ones God used to speak to her. But then she understands that God chose it to be this way: he can discern the intents of her heart and he knows that what she needs most is to humble herself.