by John Updike
Anita Haier’s father gave him a ride down the highway as far as the dirt road. David said he wanted to walk the rest, and figured that his offer was accepted because Mr. Haier did not want to dirty his dark new Oldsmobile with dust. This was all right; everything was all right, as long as it was clear. His indignation at being betrayed, at seeing Christianity betrayed, had hardened him. The road reflected his hardness. Pink stones thrust up through its packed surface. The April sun beat down from the center of the afternoon half of the sky; already it had some of summer’s heat. Already the fringes of weeds at the edges of the road were bedraggled with dust. From the reviving grass and scruff of the fields that he walked between, insects were sending up a monotonous, automatic chant. In the distance a tiny figure in his father’s coat was walking along the edge of the woods. His mother. He wondered what joy she found in such walks; to him the brown stretches of slowly rising and falling land expressed only a huge exhaustion.
Flushed with fresh air and happiness, she returned from her walk earlier than he had expected, and surprised him at his grandfather’s Bible. It was a stumpy black book, the boards worn thin where the old man’s fingers had held them; the spine hung by one weak hinge of fabric. David had been looking for the passage where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, “Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise.” He had never tried reading the Bible for himself before. What was so embarrassing about being caught at it was that he detested the apparatus of piety. Fusty churches, creaking hymns, ugly Sunday-school teachers and their stupid leaflets—he hated everything about them but the promise they held out, a promise that in the most perverse way, as if the homeliest crone in the kingdom were given the prince’s hand, made every good and real thing, ball games and jokes and big-breasted girls, possible. He couldn’t explain this to his mother. There was no time. Her solicitude was upon him.
“David, what are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you doing at your grandfather’s Bible?”
“Trying to read it. This is supposed to be a Christian country, isn’t it?”
She sat down beside him on the green sofa, which used to be in the sun parlor at Olinger, under the fancy mirror. A little smile still lingered on her face from the walk. “David, I wish you’d talk to me.”
“What about?”
“About whatever it is that’s troubling you. Your father and I have both noticed it.”
“I asked Reverend Dobson about Heaven and he said it was like Abraham Lincoln’s goodness living after him.”
He waited for the shock to strike her. “Yes?” she said, expecting more.
“That’s all.”
“And why didn’t you like it?”
“Well—don’t you see? It amounts to saying there isn’t any Heaven at all.”
“I don’t see that it amounts to that. What do you want Heaven to be?”
“Well, I don’t know. I want it to be something. I thought he’d tell me what it was. I thought that was his job.” He was becoming angry, sensing her surprise. She had assumed that Heaven had faded from his head years ago. She had imagined that he had already entered, in the secrecy of silence, the conspiracy that he now knew to be all around him.
“David,” she asked gently, “don’t you ever want to rest?”
“No. Not forever.”
“David, you’re so young. When you get older, you’ll feel differently.”
“Grandpa didn’t. Look how tattered this book is.”
“I never understood your grandfather.”
“Well, I don’t understand ministers who say it’s like Lincoln’s goodness going on and on. Suppose you’re not Lincoln?”
“I think Reverend Dobson made a mistake. You must try to forgive him.”
“It’s not a question of his making a mistake! It’s a question of dying and never moving or seeing or hearing anything ever again.”
“But”—in exasperation—“darling, it’s so greedy of you to want more. When God has given us this wonderful April day, and given us this farm, and you have your whole life ahead of you—”
“You think, then, that there is a God?”
“Of course I do”—with deep relief, that smoothed her features into a reposeful oval. He had risen in his unease; he was afraid she would reach out and touch him.
“He made everything? You feel that?”
“Yes.”
“Then who made Him?”
“Why, Man. Man.” The happiness of this answer lit up her face radiantly, until she saw his gesture of disgust. She was so simple, so illogical; such a femme.
“Well, that amounts to saying He doesn’t exist.”
Her hand reached for his wrist but he backed away. “David, it’s a mystery. A miracle. It’s a miracle more beautiful than any Reverend Dobson could have told you about. You don’t say houses don’t exist because Man made them.”
“No. God has to be different.”
“But, David, you have the evidence. Look out the window at the sun; at the fields.”
“Mother, good grief. Don’t you see”—he rasped away the roughness in his throat—“if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and whatnot are all, ah, horror? It’s just an ocean of horror.”
“But, David, it’s not. It’s so clearly not that.” And she made an urgent, opening gesture with her hands that expressed a willingness to receive his helplessness; all her grace and maternal nurturing were gathered into a passive intensity that intensely repelled him. He would not be wooed away from the truth. I am the Way, the Truth …
“No,” he told her. “Just let me alone.”
He found his tennis ball behind the piano and went outside to throw it against the side of the house. There was a patch high up where the brown stucco laid over the sandstone masonry was crumbling away; he kept trying with the tennis ball to chip more pieces off. It was difficult, aiming up; the ball kept falling short.
Superimposed upon his deep ache was a smaller but more immediate worry—that he had hurt his mother. He heard his father’s car rattling on the straightaway, and went into the house, to make peace before he arrived. To his relief, she was not giving off the stifling damp heat of her anger, but instead was cool, decisive, maternal. She handed him an old green book, her college text of Plato.
“I want you to read the Parable of the Cave,” she said.
“All right,” he said, though he knew it would do no good. Some story by a dead Greek just vague enough to please her. “Don’t worry about it, Mother.”
“I am worried. Honestly, David, I’m sure there will be something for us. As you get older, these things seem to matter a great deal less.”
“That may be. It’s a dismal thought, though.”
His father bumped at the door. The locks and jambs stuck here. But before Granmom could totter to the latch and let him in, he had knocked it open. He had been in Olinger dithering with track-meet tickets. Although Mother usually kept her talks with David a secret between them, she called instantly, “George, David is worried about death!”
Daddy came to the doorway of the living room, his shirt pocket bristling with pencils, holding in one hand a pint box of melting ice cream and in the other the knife with which he was about to divide it into four sections, their Sunday treat. “Is the kid worried about death? Don’t give it a thought, David. I’ll be lucky if I live till tomorrow, and I’m not worried. If they’d taken a buckshot gun and shot me in the cradle I’d be better off. The world’d be better off. Hell, I think death is a wonderful thing. I look forward to it. Get the garbage out of the way. If I had the man here who invented death, I’d pin a medal on him.”
“Hush, George. You’ll frighten the child worse than he is.”
This was not true; he never frightened David. There was no harm in his father, no harm at all. Indeed, in the man’s lively self-disgust the boy felt a kind of ally. A distant ally. He saw his position with a certain strategic coldness. Nowhere in the world of other people
would he find the hint, the nod, he needed to begin to build his fortress against death. They none of them believed. He was alone. In that deep hole.
In the months that followed, his position changed little. School was some comfort. All those sexy, perfumed people, wisecracking, chewing gum, all of them doomed to die, and none of them noticing. In their company David felt that they would carry him along into the bright, cheap paradise reserved for them. In any crowd, the fear ebbed a little; he had reasoned that somewhere in the world there must exist a few people who believed what was necessary, and the larger the crowd, the greater the chance that he was near such a soul, within calling distance, if only he was not too ignorant, too ill-equipped, to spot him. The sight of clergymen cheered him; whatever they themselves thought, their collars were still a sign that somewhere, at some time, someone had recognized that we cannot, cannot, submit to death. The sermon topics posted outside churches, the flip, hurried pieties of disc jockeys, the cartoons in magazines showing angels or devils—on such scraps he kept alive the possibility of hope.
For the rest, he tried to drown his hopelessness in clatter and jostle. The pinball machine at the luncheonette was a merciful distraction; as he bent over its buzzing, flashing board of flippers and cushions, the weight and constriction in his chest lightened and loosened. He was grateful for all the time his father wasted in Olinger. Every delay postponed the moment when they must ride together down the dirt road into the heart of the dark farmland, where the only light was the kerosene lamp waiting on the dining-room table, a light that drowned their food in shadow and made it sinister.
He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being ambushed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction immensities of space and time conspired to annihilate the human beings; and even in P. G. Wodehouse there was a threat, a bland mockery that acquired bite in the comic figures of futile clergymen. All gaiety seemed minced out on the skin of a void. All quiet hours seemed invitations to dread.
Even on weekends, he and his father contrived to escape the farm; and when, some Saturdays, they did stay home, it was to do something destructive—tear down an old henhouse or set huge brush fires that threatened, while Mother shouted and flapped her arms, to spread to the woods. Whenever his father worked, it was with rapt violence; when he chopped kindling, fragments of the old henhouse boards flew like shrapnel and the ax-head was always within a quarter of an inch of flying off the handle. He was exhilarating to watch, sweating and swearing and sucking bits of saliva back into his mouth.
School stopped. His father took the car in the opposite direction, to a highway construction job where he had been hired for the summer as a timekeeper, and David was stranded in the middle of acres of heat and greenery and blowing pollen and the strange, mechanical humming that lay invisibly in the weeds and alfalfa and dry orchard grass.
For his fourteenth birthday his parents gave him, with jokes about him being a hillbilly now, a Remington .22. It was somewhat like a pinball machine to take it out to the old kiln in the woods where they dumped their trash, and set up tin cans on the kiln’s sandstone shoulder and shoot them off one by one. He’d take the puppy, who had grown long legs and a rich coat of reddish fur—he was part chow. Copper hated the gun but loved the boy enough to accompany him. When the flat, acrid crack rang out, he would race in terrified circles that would tighten and tighten until they brought him, shivering, against David’s legs. Depending upon his mood, David would shoot again or drop to his knees and comfort the dog. Giving this comfort returned some comfort to him. The dog’s ears, laid flat against his skull in fear, were folded so intricately, so—he groped for the concept—surely. Where the dull-studded collar made the fur stand up, each hair showed a root of soft white under the length, black-tipped, of the metal color that had lent the dog its name. In his agitation Copper panted through nostrils that were elegant slits, like two healed cuts, or like the keyholes of a dainty lock of black, grained wood. His whole whorling, knotted, jointed body was a wealth of such embellishments. And in the smell of the dog’s hair David seemed to descend through many finely differentiated layers of earth: mulch, soil, sand, clay, and the glittering mineral base.
But when he returned to the house, and saw the books arranged on the low shelves, fear dully returned. The four adamant volumes of Wells like four thin bricks, the green Plato that had puzzled him with its dialogue form and hard-to-picture shadow show, the dead Galsworthy and “Elizabeth,” Grandpa’s mammoth dictionary, Grandpa’s old Bible, the limp-covered Bible that he himself had received on becoming confirmed a member of the Firetown Lutheran Church—at the sight of these, the memory of his fear reawakened and came around him. He had grown stiff and stupid in its embrace. His parents tried to think of ways to entertain him.
“David, I have a job for you to do,” his mother said one evening at the table.
“What?”
“If you’re going to take that tone perhaps we’d better not talk.”
“What tone? I didn’t take any tone.”
“Your grandmother thinks there are too many pigeons in the barn.”
“Why?” David turned to look at his grandmother, but she sat there staring at the burning lamp with her usual expression of bewilderment. Her irises were pale discs of crazed crystal.
Mother shouted, “Mom, he wants to know why!”
Granmom made a jerky, irritable motion with her bad hand, as if generating the force for utterance, and said, “They foul the furniture.”
“That’s right,” Mother said. “She’s afraid for that old Olinger furniture that we’ll never use. David, she’s been after me for a month about those poor pigeons. She wants you to shoot them.”
“I don’t want to kill anything especially,” David said.
Daddy said, “The kid’s like you are, Elsie. He’s too good for this world. Kill or be killed, that’s my motto.”
His mother said loudly, “Mother, he doesn’t want to do it.”
“Not?” The old lady’s eyes distended as if in alarm, and her claw descended slowly to her lap.
“Oh, I’ll do it, I’ll do it tomorrow,” David snapped, and a pleasant crisp taste entered his mouth with the decision.
“And I had thought, when Boyer’s men made the hay, it would be better if the barn doesn’t look like a rookery,” his mother added needlessly.
A barn, in day, is a small night. The splinters of light between the dry shingles pierce the high roof like stars, and the rafters and crossbeams and built-in ladders seem, until your eyes adjust, as mysterious as the branches of a haunted forest. David entered silently, the gun in one hand. Copper whined desperately at the door, too frightened to come in with the gun yet unwilling to leave the boy. David stealthily turned, said “Go away,” shut the door on the dog, and slipped the bolt across. It was a door within a door; the double door for wagons and tractors was as high and wide as the face of a house.
The smell of old straw scratched his sinuses. The red sofa, half hidden under its white-splotched tarpaulin, seemed assimilated into this smell, sunk in it, buried. The mouths of empty bins gaped like caves. Rusty oddments of farming—coils of baling wire, some spare tines for a harrow, a handleless shovel—hung on nails driven here and there in the thick wood. He stood stock-still a minute; it took a while to separate the cooing of the pigeons from the rustling in his ears. When he had focused on the cooing, it flooded the vast interior with its throaty, bubbling outpour: there seemed no other sound. They were up behind the beams. What light there was leaked through the shingles and the dirty glass windows at the far end and the small round holes, about as big as basketballs, high on the opposite stone side walls, under the ridge of the roof.
A pigeon appeared in one of these holes, on the side toward the house. It flew in, with a battering of wings, from the outside, and waited there, silhouetted against its pinched bit of sky, preening and cooing in a throbbing, thrilled, tentative way. David tiptoed four steps to the side, r
ested his gun against the lowest rung of a ladder pegged between two upright beams, and lowered the gunsight into the bird’s tiny, jauntily cocked head. The slap of the report seemed to come off the stone wall behind him, and the pigeon did not fall. Neither did it fly. Instead it stuck in the round hole, pirouetting rapidly and nodding its head as if in frantic agreement. David shot the bolt back and forth and had aimed again before the spent cartridge had stopped jingling on the boards by his feet. He eased the tip of the sight a little lower, into the bird’s breast, and took care to squeeze the trigger with perfect evenness. The slow contraction of his hand abruptly sprang the bullet; for a half-second there was doubt, and then the pigeon fell like a handful of rags, skimming down the barn wall into the layer of straw that coated the floor of the mow on this side.
Now others shook loose from the rafters, and whirled in the dim air with a great blurred hurtle of feathers and noise. They would go for the hole; he fixed his sight on the little moon of blue, and when a pigeon came to it, shot him as he was walking the twenty inches of stone that would have carried him into the open air. This pigeon lay down in that tunnel of stone, unable to fall either one way or the other, although he was alive enough to lift one wing and cloud the light. The wing would sink back, and he would suddenly lift it again, the feathers flaring. His body blocked that exit. David raced to the other side of the barn’s main aisle, where a similar ladder was symmetrically placed, and rested his gun on the same rung. Three birds came together to this hole; he got one, and two got through. The rest resettled in the rafters.
There was a shallow triangular space behind the crossbeams supporting the roof. It was here they roosted and hid. But either the space was too small, or they were curious, for now that his eyes were at home in the dusty gloom David could see little dabs of gray popping in and out. The cooing was shriller now; its apprehensive tremolo made the whole volume of air seem liquid. He noticed one little smudge of a head that was especially persistent in peeking out; he marked the place, and fixed his gun on it, and when the head appeared again, had his finger tightened in advance on the trigger. A parcel of fluff slipped off the beam and fell the barn’s height onto a canvas covering some Olinger furniture, and where its head had peeked out there was a fresh prick of light in the shingles.
