The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  At lunchtime Mon had been after him to show some enthusiasm as a visitor when the telephone rang. ‘I think we’ll take a walk around the neighbourhood after lunch. Explore things. I’ll show Ed the Mansion House.’

  ‘You wouldn’t mind getting that, would you?’ Warren was at the sink, his hands full with a colander of cooked spaghetti that he was splashing with olive oil. He was looking at Edgar when he said that, who stared blankly back, because Edgar didn’t like to use the telephone, and Mon took the call before Fay could finish making her preparations to leave her chair.

  ‘Yes,’ Mon said to the telephone, and as the conversation went on Edgar watched her expression change from patient to pleased.

  Warren brought over the food. ‘Would you like a Kool-Aid?’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Edgar, wondering what it was he had said yes to. He hoped it wasn’t a piece of sports equipment. But Edgar felt expansive; he would take whatever the world offered him.

  ‘I might be going to New York a little early,’ Mon said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘That was Hen. It’s all very boring but it would be more convenient if I went there a little earlier than planned.’

  His mother looked both stoical and frenzied. She pushed the salt cellar between her hands and stared at it in surprise when it fell over.

  ‘I can’t do it. Your father’s not even here yet. And your birthday …’

  ‘He’ll be all right with us, won’t you, Ed?’ said Warren.

  For something to do, Edgar brushed at sleeping Tom’s fur until he became aware that ginger clumps of the stuff were coming away in his hands.

  ‘Ed?’

  ‘Yes. Of course I will.’

  Nonetheless Edgar was alerted. Being here motherless was not unattractive, but Mon’s mood was both wilder and more discomfiting than he was used to. Perhaps it was torture for her to stay in this house, everything here a reminder of her failures as a woman and a wife, but that was a betrayal of him, who would never have been born without this place.

  Edgar tried to pat the cat fur back into place. Tom’s only signs of life were the shallow rises of his chest to accompany each noisy breath, and the little rivulets of effluvia that leaked out of his face.

  ‘That’s so sweet of you to try to groom him,’ Fay said. ‘A lot of people would see him as a lost cause and they’d be missing the point completely.’

  ‘I’ve put her numbers on the pinboard. That’s her work number and that’s her home, and I’ll call you after I get there.’

  ‘When are you going?’

  ‘Well. If you’re sure. I could go in the morning. It’s a real bore,’ Mon said.

  She sighed, hoping to indicate some of the boredom she purported to feel, but Edgar knew better. A small overspill of the curious excitement that was going through her seeped over to him.

  Warren delivered a glass of some watery red liquid, which Edgar sipped at and found delicious.

  ‘Your father will be here tomorrow,’ Mon said—which was, Edgar observed, the first time she had given this up as an undisputed fact.

  ‘Yes, he will,’ Edgar said, pursuing his advantage.

  ‘You can call me if anything goes wrong.’

  She moved over to hug him and rub his hair. He accepted the hug, stiffly, and pulled his hair back into its proper spiky shape, adding a few stray hairs of Tom’s to his own.

  ‘Oh Eddie.’

  She might have been about to weep. Fay reached a hand to her. ‘You mustn’t worry about a thing,’ Fay said.

  ‘I’ll run you to the airport in the morning,’ Warren said.

  ‘That’s so nice of you. I don’t want to be any trouble.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  The rhythms of the Pagan House were based around mealtimes, and Edgar was required at supper that night.

  ‘I think it’ll be amusing for both of you. Some of the local personalities will be here,’ Fay said.

  ‘Company Bob and so forth,’ Warren said.

  ‘I’m sure,’ Mon said.

  Edgar followed his mother up to her room and watched her pack. He tried to get out of supper but Mon was at her most ruthless: ‘This is my last night here. It’ll be horrible if you’re not around.’

  ‘I’ll be around. I’ll be upstairs.’

  ‘You absolutely won’t be upstairs. You’ll be at the dinner table. It’s far too rude otherwise.’

  ‘What would be just rude enough?’

  She clicked her tongue and jerked her chin, she gave him her exasperated ‘Oh, Eddie!’ look and checked again that her passport was in the side-pocket of her handbag. ‘Please get ready. Change your trousers. Wear your good ones.’

  Edgar lies on the bed and Edgar scratches. From the wall by his bed he lifts away the damp flap of wallpaper—navy blue, golden stars—and finds another layer of wallpaper beneath. It might once have been cream or white but now is aged urinous yellow, with washed-green cartoon stencils of amiable little rocketmen in large transparent helmets hardly smaller than the dinky little spaceships they ride in. This might have been his father’s childhood wallpaper, glimpses of a happy boundless future, where cheerful little astronauts enjoyed the freedom of infinite flight. This patch of wall is Edgar’s own time-machine. Now he sits here, in 1995, damp blue walls, faded golden stars; now he pulls himself into the early 1960s, and there’s paper beneath that one, and beneath that one; brave Edgar in wartime touches trompe l’oeil pillars; Edgar in the Great Depression wonderingly touches something sickly yellow. And beneath that one is paint, dull brown, which Edgar scratches at with his well-practised right hand, rubbing himself into a further past, white paint, go further, bare pine wood, the original wall, on which a man, the builder, or the architect, or Old Uncle Pagan himself, had pencilled in measurements in a high, confident, sloping hand.

  5

  Christ charged his disciples not to publish all the truths he had committed to them, in the injunction, ‘Cast not your pearls before swine’, and on the other hand he forbore to tell them many things which were in his heart, because they were ‘not able to bear them’. In his conversation with Nicodemus, he signified that there was a class of interior truths, which he called ‘heavenly things’, more incredible and unintelligible to the sensual understanding by far than the doctrine of regeneration that Nicodemus made so great a mystery of; that he classed among earthly things.

  Paul refers to heavenly things when he says, ‘We speak wisdom among them that are perfect.’ The Corinthians to whom he was writing, ‘were yet carnal’; he could not speak unto them as unto spiritual; but he stirred up their ambition to become spiritual, that they might know the deep things of God. When he was caught up into paradise, he heard ‘unspeakable words’ that it was ‘not lawful for a man to utter’. (I Cor. 2:6. II Cor. 12:4. John 16:12, 13. Rev. 11: 15–19)

  Bible Communism, John Prindle Stone, 1844

  The stones are hard against the plough. Abram Carter has warned him of the damage that stones can do to the blade of the plough. George Pagan has to keep stopping the horse so he can pick the stones away from their path, digging them out half buried from the soil, his futile harvest, breaking his skin, his fingernails, his heart. Blind Jess at least is docile. She stands, tail swishing, the only part of her that shows any vitality.

  Jess waits for George to nudge her back into movement. The sunlight is fading, sun going down over the blue hills towards Turkey Street. Here, in this pre-Edenic grove, where wild roses grow and cardinals and goldfinches chirp and cheep, mocking his pretensions as a farmhand, George Pagan pushes the frame of the plough and Jess walks on. George steers, trying to make straight furrows; he has to fight to keep the blade at the correct angle. He had not thought this would be so hard: he had imagined himself into a picture of farming, the light fading on the ploughman’s noble calling, the soil made ready for the vegetables that would sustain two families and whoever joined them for sustenance of spirit and flesh, man and nature united in creation. It is not the pictur
e he had imagined when he had tired of indoor work, city work and therefore fallen work, no matter how virtuous in intent and execution, the composing and printing and distributing of Moral Reform tracts. He had longed to be in a place like this and had never conceived how brutal it would be to submit to the turning of the earth, the passage of the seasons, God’s heartbeat. Here there is no joy, the plough blade turns, scrapes against this dismal earth, the shallow misbegotten furrows; he stops, wipes his forehead with his hand, merely redistributing the sweat and cutting in the sharp grains of earth that have somehow gathered to his skin. In the parlour of the old stone house, the lantern shines more brightly, lighting the scene within. Mary Pagan, George’s wife, sits at the table, her black hair falling in front of her face as Abram Carter instructs her in the ways of Perfectionism. George hopes her path is less rocky than his.

  He has been told to plough until called upon to stop and he will. Even though he mistrusts Captain Carter’s manner—delivery obtrudes its substance: he lacks humility, takes too much pride in the sound of the words in his mouth, the orator’s performance, the actor’s pleasures—Mary has confidence in the teaching of Abram Carter, and Mary has an instinct for purity, and truth, that George trusts far better than his own. A hand, his wife’s, reaches out to the window, and George’s heart lifts—here it comes now, the call to finish his labour of the day; he will tether the horse, return the plough to its shed, move back inside to the care and, he hopes, the caresses of his wife. His wife’s arm, illuminated, falls across the window like a clock hand; it is a moment of translucence and hope that, he is forced to admit, would not cut into him nor uplift him quite so directly, so purely, had he not exerted himself so greatly through this ordeal of a day. But the arm does not beckon, the window does not open, he does not hear his wife’s musical voice calling him in from his toil. Instead, the curtain is drawn, pulled between him and the light and the inhabitants of the parlour.

  George Pagan trudges on. Blind Jess trudges on. They have no light to steer by. The plough cuts blindly into the soil; and George Pagan devises an analogy. He is not good at devising analogies—he does not possess an associative or synthetic mind: to him things are as they are, form is form, even if dimly he apprehends the possibility of its transformation —but this is as good an analogy as he has ever framed, this the path of the believer in the fallen world finding his way to sinlessness: the way is dark, the day is endless, the horse is blind, the path is stony; his faith sustains him. George Pagan reaches the end of one furrow. Cumbersomely, he turns to begin another.

  George, proud in the aftermath of his labour, and a little vain of his analogy, reports it to his companions after he has walked Jess back to her field and scrubbed some of the earth away from his skin. He sips at the hot, sweet tea that Mary has prepared for him.

  Abram Carter, the appointed under-teacher of John Prindle Stone’s Perfectionism, slides a finger across the short beard on his chin in the manner he has copied from his master. He nods. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘this is the teaching that must be lived before it can be learned. The way is hard. But we too are making progress.’

  Mary frowns. Something foreign passes across her face. ‘Oh, George,’ she says. ‘You must be tired.’

  He is. He hasn’t realized just how tired. If it weren’t for Mary removing his boots he would have fallen into bed dressed for the plough.

  And so pass their days, Mrs Pagan and Captain Carter in reading and doctrinal discussion, closeted indoors, Mr Pagan at work in the field.

  Sometimes George imagines a house where he is ploughing. It is a mild and acceptable form of heresy, he supposes. Instead of the field of corn to sustain them, he invents a house, a family home, built in the modern manner, where he, and Mary, and little Georgie, and the future ones, the Pagan tribe, as yet unborn, will grow and thrive in undirected sinlessness.

  Tentatively he attempts to report his fantasy to Mary. It is night and he is wretched with the cold, with the dirt of the land, with the dull accumulated efforts of his blind-horse days. They are in bed; outside, the land is dark with night, fruitful for the imagining of his house, their house, their future lives free of the doctrinal diligence of Abram Carter. He imagines his wife reading to their children in the parlour, an infinity of playful little Pagan children gathered around her skirts, heeding the soft musical truths of her voice. He imagines the house, its gables, the fires that burn in its grates, the rooms that meet each other across polished wooden corridors; he imagines a love-seat on the porch, a rope-swing suspended from the branches of the sycamore tree. What he fails to imagine, what he is unable to see, is himself in any of these pictures—his family flourishes in the house that he has generously built for them, but he absolutely fails to see himself. Vengefully, he invents a field, a blind, skittish horse, a rusty plough to which he sternly tethers Abram Carter. Returning to the invented house he still fails to find himself inside it.

  ‘Mary?’ he says. ‘I’ve been imagining a house.’

  At first he supposes his wife to be asleep. Her breathing is light and rapid. She lies perfectly still as does he, even though his limbs ache with the discomfort of the posture he has chosen or fallen into for sleep. It costs him more to shift than to stay as he is.

  ‘Mary?’

  He whispers more loudly: something troubles him, her stillness, the quick shallowness of her breathing. She turns away from him. Her voice is muffled by her pillow.

  ‘Oh, George.’

  She is weeping. He would like to comfort her but he has never been skilled at that, and anyway his body, tortured by the day, mortified by the plough, refuses him any movement.

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘George,’ she finally manages to say, ‘I am so happy.’

  6

  Edgar liked rebel rock ’n’ roll and punk rock and primitive heavy metal, loud noises made before he was born by scowling teenagers in leather jackets with snotty attitudes. Edgar liked songs that rocked and then faded out, as if there was no possible ending to them: shut the door, walk away, and the band still plays on: the drummer keeps clattering, despite the awful weight of his arms; the vocalist sings, his futile eyes examining the sealed room for any possibility of escape; the guitarist picks eternally at his guitar, sitting down now, saving his energy, no more wild darts to the microphone stand; the bass guitarist thuds away, fingers bleeding, and the song goes on for ever. All of Edgar’s favourite songs faded out. He was suspicious of music that knew how to stop.

  Seed-spattering Edgar, singing along to his Walkman, wiped down his grandmother’s bathroom surfaces.

  Number two. He wondered how old he would be when he could no longer count the number of times he had done this. That would be the end of innocence, he supposed. Edgar worked with flannel and Ajax fluid, cleaning the bathtub with an assiduousness that would have surprised and gratified his mother.

  Cheerfully, he gave a second polish to the handrails on the sides of the tub, and enjoyed a pleasant interlude on his hands and knees inspecting the black and white dominoes of the tiled floor, before he banged his head on the brass toilet-roll holder. He returned the flannel to where he had found it, around the stem of the dripping hot tap. He wondered how his stuff might taste. Sickly sweet like breast milk, maybe, which he had sampled at Herman Opoku’s house one afternoon after school before their falling-out. Herman had opened the refrigerator door to show the bottles of milk expressed for his baby sister by his mother, whom Edgar had never met and who worked as a hospital nurse when she wasn’t expressing breast milk. Like connoisseurs, Herman and Edgar had taken small, considering sips from a bottle, which they topped up with water, scrupulously boiled in the Opoku kettle. Herman Opoku told him that semen tasted salty, like caviar, and Edgar had changed the subject. He did not want to find out how or why Herman Opoku had tasted semen and neither did he want to show how impressed he was that Herman Opoku had tasted caviar. Edgar, or The Edster as he’d been then (pre-Edgar, a previous life), wasn’t even supposed to eat the lumpfish
that his mother served on blinis with dollops of cream at her vodka parties. ‘It’s a sophisticated taste,’ she said. ‘You won’t like it. Hands off.’

  Caviar and stuff were linking now in his mind. He chose to go with it, imagining a crucial part of the caviar-production process as the smearing of fish eggs with male stuff, an intricate, costly procedure, which was the secret reason why the resulting delicacy was so prized. Perhaps there were men, perhaps there were boys, trained, or bred, a family tradition, or kidnapped for that very purpose, condemned to a life of senseless erotic drudgery, milked like cows by Ukrainian women in dairy aprons and hats, or connected, in long, dehumanized rows, to machines by rubber hoses and electricity leads wired into the most sensitive places of penis and brain. Ruuugghghg. He shivered. He had never liked milk trucks and now he knew why.

  A final inspection of the room revealed only one dollop that he’d missed, on the mirror over the sink. Urbanely flicking it away, he rinsed it under the tap and watched it swirl down the plughole. He sniffed his finger, which smelled both salty and sickly, a scent that reminded him of autumn. His mother was calling him, loud enough to be heard over the Walkman.

  ‘Edward!’

  ‘Coming.’

  He was happy here and sorry to leave. The bathroom contained but was not cluttered by old person’s things, and Edgar found the place delightful. The walls were papered in purple and gold. The ceiling was white. Along the ledge by the side of the bath were medicines and dried sponges and bottles of bubble bath. The window between the bathtub and toilet looked over the garden, where roses climbed over the far trellis as if they were trying to get away, a wooden shed, some plant beds of what looked like salad leaves. Threads of a long-ago rope-swing hung from a venerable sort of tree. In the alcove by the toilet there was an anthology of cat cartoons, a history of the Onyataka Association, and a guide to the flora and fauna of Central New York State. Edgar was unimpressed by the cartoon book, uninterested in natural history; he opened the Onyataka Association book at the place that had been marked. The pages had been much underlined, with pencilled comments in the margins, and a small black-and-white photograph on the page of an unsmiling woman wearing a plain dress over trousers, but Edgar was more, if briefly, interested in the photograph that had been used as a bookmark. It was a snapshot of Warren, with close-cropped hair, standing out of focus on a front lawn with his arm around a white-haired lady who wore a red shawl over her shoulders and, unlike Warren, was smiling. She was, Edgar decided, Warren’s widowed grandmother. He saw her as a retired actress, and liked Warren all the better for her.