Sacrament
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XII
Sherwood had intended to retreat to the vestibule, away from the Courtroom and the smell of burning there, which turned his stomach. But in the guttering darkness he took the wrong route, and instead of being delivered to the front of the building, he found himself lost in a labyrinth. He tried to double back, but he was too frightened to think clearly. All he could do was stumble on, tears stinging his eyes, as it got darker and darker.
Then, a glimmer of light. It wasn’t starlight – it was too warm – but he made for it anyway, and found himself delivered into a small chamber in which somebody had been working. There was a chair and a small desk, and on the desk a hurricane lamp, which shed its light on a selection of items. Wiping away his tears, Sherwood went to look. There were bottles of ink, maybe a dozen of them, and some pens and brushes, and lying in the midst of this equipment a book, about the size of one of his school-books but much thicker. The binding was stained and the spine cracked, as though it had been carried around for years. Sherwood reached to flip it open, but before he could do so, a soft voice said:
‘What’s your name?’
He looked up and there, emerging from the doorway on the other side of the chamber, was the woman from the Courtroom. Sherwood felt a little shudder of pleasure pass through him at the sight of her. Her blouse was unbuttoned, and the skin exposed fairly shone.
‘My name’s Rosa,’ she said.
‘I’m Sherwood.’
‘You’re a big boy. How old are you?’
‘Almost eleven.’
‘You want to come here, so I can see you better?’
Sherwood wasn’t sure. There was definitely something exciting about the way she was looking at him, smiling at him, and maybe if he got a little closer he’d see that unbuttoned place better, which was certainly a temptation. He knew all the dirty words from school, of course, and he’d glimpsed a few well-thumbed pictures that had been passed around. But his schoolmates kept him out of the really smutty conversations, because he was a little daft. What would they say, he thought, if he could tell them he’d set eyes on a pair of naked bosoms, in the flesh?
‘My, but you stare,’ Rosa said. Sherwood flushed. ‘Oh it’s quite all right,’ she said. ‘Boys should see as much as they want to see. As long as they know how to appreciate it.’ So saying, she reached up and unbuttoned herself a little further. Sherwood tried to swallow, but he couldn’t. He could see the swell of her breasts very easily now. If he stepped a little closer he’d see her nipples, and by the look of welcome on her face she would not censure him for doing so.
He stepped towards her. ‘I wonder what you could get up to,’ she said, ‘if I let you loose?’ He didn’t entirely understand what she was talking about, but he had a pretty good idea. ‘Would you lick my titties for me?’ she said.
His head was throbbing now, and there was a pressure in his pants so intense he was afraid he was going to wet himself. And as if her words weren’t exciting enough, she was opening her blouse a little further, and there were her nipples, large and pink, and she was rubbing them a little, smiling at him all the time.
‘Let’s see that tongue of yours,’ she said.
He stuck out his tongue.
‘You’re going to have to work hard,’ she said. ‘It’s a little tongue and I’ve got big titties. Haven’t I?’
He nodded. He was three steps from her, and he could smell her body. It was a strong smell, like nothing he’d quite breathed before, but she could have smelt like manure and it couldn’t have kept him from her now. He reached out and laid his fingers upon her breasts. She sighed. Then he put his face to her flesh and began to lick.
‘Will…’
‘He’s fine,’ said the man in the dusty black coat. ‘He’s just overcome with excitement. Why don’t you just leave him be and run off home?’
‘I won’t go without Will,’ Frannie said, sounding a good deal more confident than she felt.
‘He doesn’t need your help,’ the man replied, his tone scoured of threat. ‘He’s perfectly happy here.’ He looked down at Will. ‘He’s simply a little overwhelmed.’
Keeping her eye on the man, Frannie went down on her haunches beside Will and, reaching for him, shook him violently. He made a moan, and she chanced a quick look down at him. ‘Get up,’ she said. He looked very befuddled. ‘Up,’ she said.
The man in black had meanwhile settled back in his seat, and was shaking the contents of his hand out onto the table. Bright, burning fragments fluttered down. Will was already turning back in the man’s direction, though he was not yet standing upright.
‘Come back here,’ the man said to Will.
‘Don’t…’ Frannie said. The flames on the table were dying down, the room giving way to darkness. She was afraid as she was only afraid in dreams. ‘Sherwood!’ she yelled.
‘Sherwood!’
‘Don’t listen,’ the woman said, pressing Sherwood to her breast.
‘Sherwood!’
He couldn’t ignore his sister’s summons; not when it had such a measure of panic in it. He pulled away from Rosa’s hot skin, the sweat running down his face.
That’s Frannie,’ he said, pulling himself free of the woman. She was wearing, he saw, a strange expression – her panting mouth open, her eyes quivering. It unnerved him.
‘I have to go—’ he started to say, but she was plucking at her dress, as if to show him more.
‘I know what you want to see,’ she said.
He retreated from her, his hand thrown out behind him for support.
‘You want what’s under here,’ she said, pulling up her hem.
‘No,’ he said.
She smiled at him, and kept raising her skirt. Panicked, and confused by the stew of feelings that was bubbling up in him, he stumbled backwards, and his weight struck the table. It tipped. The book, the inks, the pens and, worst of all, the lamp went to the floor. There was a moment when it seemed the flame went out; but then it bloomed with fresh gusto, and the rubbish around the desk caught fire.
Mrs McGee dropped her skirts. ‘Jacob!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh Jesus Lord, Jacob!’
Sherwood had more reason to panic than she did, surrounded as he was by combustible materials. Even in his dazed state, he knew he had to get out quickly, or be numbered amongst them. The easiest route was the door by which he’d entered.
‘Jacob! Get in here, will you?’ Rosa was yelling, and without so much as glancing in Sherwood’s direction again, she left the chamber to find her companion.
The blaze was getting bigger by the moment, smoke and heat filling the chamber, driving Sherwood back. But as he turned to leave, his body trembling from the excesses of the last few minutes, he caught sight of the book, lying there on the ground.
He had no idea what it contained, but it felt like proof. He would have it when his schoolmates scoffed, to show them and say:
‘I was there. I did all I told you and more.’
Daring the flames, he ducked and snatched the book off the ground. It was a little singed, no more. Then he was away, back through the labyrinth of passages, towards his sister’s voice.
‘Sherwood!’
She and Will were at the Courtroom door.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Will growled, and tried to pull himself free of Frannie. But she was having none of it. She kept a bruising grip on his arm, all the while yelling her brother’s name.
Jacob, meanwhile, had risen from his place at the table, alarmed by the sound of conflagration, and now by the sight of Mrs McGee in a state of disarray, demanding that he come right now, right now.
He went with her, glancing back at Will once, and nodding such a tiny nod as if to say: go with her. This is not the moment. Then he was gone, away with Rosa, to put out the flames.
As soon as he was out of sight. Will felt a curious calm pass over him. There was no need to struggle with Frannie any more. He could simply go with her, out into the open air, knowing that there would be another time, a better time, when he and Jacob would be together. ‘I’m all right—’ he said to Frannie. ‘I don’t need anyone to hold me up.’
‘I’ve got to find Sherwood,’ she said.
‘Here!’ came a shout from the smoky darkness, and out he came, his face smeared with dirt and sweat.
There were no further words. They pelted down the passageway to the front door and out, past the pillars, and down the steps, into the cold grass. Only when they were past the hedge, out onto the track, did they halt for breath.
‘Don’t tell anybody what we saw in there, okay?’ Will gasped.
‘Why not?’ Frannie wanted to know.
‘Because you’ll spoil everything,’ Will replied.
‘They’re bad. Will—’
‘You don’t know anything about them.’
‘Neither do you.’
‘Yes, I do. I’ve met them before. They want me to go away with them.’
‘Is that true?’ Sherwood piped up.
‘Shut up, Sherwood,’ Frannie said. ‘We’re not going to talk about this any longer. It’s stupid. They’re bad and I know they’re bad.’ She turned to her brother. ‘Will can do whatever he likes,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop him. But you’re not coming here again, Sherwood, and neither am I.’ With that she picked up her bicycle and mounted, telling Sherwood to hurry up and do the same. Meekly, he obeyed.
‘So you won’t say anything?’ Will pleaded.
‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ Frannie replied in an infuriatingly snotty tone. ‘I’ll have to see.’ With that she and Sherwood pedalled off down the track.
‘If you do I’ll never speak to you again,’ Will shouted after her, only realizing when they were out of sight that this was a hollow threat from a man who’d just declared that he was leaving forever some day soon.
I
i
‘Is he dreaming?’ Adrianna asked Dr Koppelman one day in early spring, when her visit to sit at Will’s bedside coincided with the physician’s rounds.
It was almost four months since the events in Balthazar, and in its own almost miraculous way Will’s mauled and fractured body was mending itself. But the coma was as profound as ever. No sign of motion disturbed the glacial surface of his state. The nurses moved him regularly so as to prevent his developing bedsores; his bodily needs were taken care of with drips and catheters. But he did not, would not, wake. And often, when Adrianna had come to visit him through that dreary Winnipeg winter, and looked down at his placid face, she found herself wondering: what are you doing?
Hence her question. She normally had an allergic response to doctors, but Koppelman, who insisted on being called Bernie, was an exception. He was in his early fifties, overweight, and to judge by the stains on his fingers (and his minted breath) a heavy smoker. He was also honest when it came to his ignorance, which she liked, even though it meant he didn’t really have any answers for her.
‘We’re as much in the dark as Will is right now,’ he went on. ‘He may be in a completely closed down state as far as his consciousness is concerned. On the other hand he may be accessing memories at such a deep level we can’t monitor the brain activity. I just don’t know.’
‘But he could still come out of it,’ Adrianna said, looking down at Will.
‘Oh certainly,’ Koppelman said. ‘At any time. But I can’t offer you any guarantees. There are processes at work in his skull right now that frankly we don’t understand.’
‘Do you think it makes any difference if I’m here with him?’
‘Were you and he very close?’
‘You mean lovers? No. We worked together.’
Koppelman nibbled at his thumbnail. ‘I’ve seen cases where the presence of somebody the patient knew at the bedside did seem to help things. But…’
‘…you don’t think this is one of those.’
Koppelman looked concerned. ‘You want my honest opinion?’ he said, lowering his voice.
‘Yes.’
‘People have to get on with their lives. You’ve done more than a lot of people would, coming here, day in, day out. You don’t live in the city, do you?’
‘No. I live in San Francisco.’
That’s right. There was talk about moving Will back, wasn’t there?’
There are a lot of people dying in San Francisco.’
Koppelman looked grim. ‘What can I tell you?’ he said. ‘You could be sitting here for another six months, another year, and he’d still be in a coma. That’s a waste of your life. I know you want to do your best for him but…you see what I’m saying?’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s painful to hear, I know.’
‘It makes sense,’ she replied. ‘It’s just…I can’t quite face the idea of leaving him here.’
‘He doesn’t know, Adrianna.’
‘Then why are you whispering?’
Caught in the act, Koppelman grinned sheepishly. ‘I’m only saying the chances are, that wherever he is he doesn’t care about the world out here.’ He glanced back towards the bed. ‘And you know what? Maybe he’s happy.’
ii
Maybe he’s happy. The words haunted Adrianna, reminding her of how often she and Will had talked – deeply, passionately – about the subject of happiness, and how much she now missed his conversation.
He was not, he had often said, designed for happiness. It was too much like contentment, and contentment was too much like sleep. He liked discomfort – sought it out, in fact (how often had she been stuck in some grim little hide, too hot or too cold, and looked over at him to see him grinning from ear to ear? Physical adversity had reminded him he was alive, and life, he’d told her oh so many times, was his obsession).
Not everybody had found evidence of that affirmation in his work. The critical response to both the books and exhibitions had often been antagonistic. Few reviewers had questioned Will’s skills – he had the temperament, the vision and the technical grasp to be a great photographer. But why, they complained, did he have to be so relentlessly grim? Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?
While we may admire Will RabJohns’ consistency of vision, the Time critic had written of ‘Feeding the Fire’, his accounts of the way humanity brutalizes and destroys natural phenomena become in turn brutal and destructive to those very sensibilities it wishes to arouse to pity or action. The viewer gives up hope in the face of his reports. We watch the extinction with despairing hearts. Well, Mr Rabjohns, we have dutifully despaired. What now?
It was the same question Adrianna asked herself when Dr Koppelman went about his rounds. What now? She’d wept, she’d cursed, she’d even found enough of her much-despised Catholic training intact to pray, but none of it was going to open Will’s eyes. And meanwhile, her life was ticking on.
This was not the only issue in play. She’d found a lover here in Winnipeg (an ambulance driver, of all things); a fellow called Neil, who was far from her ideal of manhood but who was plainly attracted to her. She owed him answers to the questions he asked her nightly: why couldn’t they move in together; just try it out for a couple of months, see if it worked?
She sat down on the bed beside Will, took his hand in hers and told him what was going through her head.
‘I know I’ll be pulled in to this half-assed relationship with Neil if I hang around here, and he’s probably more your type than he is mine. He’s a bear, you know. He hasn’t got a hairy back—’ she added hurriedly’—I know you hate hairy backs, but he’s big – and a bit of a lunk in a sexy kind of way, but I can’t live with him. Will. I can’t. And I can’t live here. I mean, I was staying for him and for you, and right now you’re not taking any notice of me and he’s taking too much notice, so it’s a bad deal all around. Life’s not a rehearsal, right? Isn’t that one of Cornelius’ pearls of wisdom? He’s gone back to Baltimore, by the way. I don’t hear from him, which is probably for the best because he always annoyed the fuck out of me. Anyhow, he had that line about life not being a rehearsal and he’s right. If I hang around here I’m going to end up moving in with Neil and we’re just going to get cosy when you’re going to open your eyes – and Will, you are going to open your eyes – and you’re going to say we gotta go to Antarctica. And Neil’s going to say: no you’re not. And I’m going to say: yes I am. And there’ll be tears, and they won’t be mine. I can’t do that to him. He deserves better.
‘So…what am I saying? I’m saying I have to take Neil out for a beer and tell him it’s not going to work, then I have to haul my ass back to San Francisco, and get my shit together, because baby thanks to you I have never been so untogether in my whole damn life.’
She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘You know why. It’s not something we’ve talked about and if you had your eyes open right now I wouldn’t be saying it because what’s the use? But Will: I love you. I love you so much and most of the time it’s okay, because we get to work together and I figure you love me back, in your way. Okay, it’s not the way I’d really like it, if I had the choice, but I don’t so I’ll take whatever I can. And that’s all you’re getting. And if you can hear this, you should know buddy, when you wake up I will deny every fucking word, okay? Every fucking word.’ She got up from beside the bed, feeling tears close. ‘Damn you, Will,’ she said. ‘All you have to do is open your eyes. It’s not that difficult. There’s so much to see, Will. It’s icy fucking cold, but there’s this great clean light on everything: you’d like it. Just. Open. Your. Eyes.’ She watched and waited, as if by force of thought she could stir him. But there was no motion, except the mechanical rising and falling of his chest.
‘Okay. I can take a hint. I’d better get going. I’ll come visit you again before I go.’ She leaned over him and lightly kissed him on the forehead. ‘I tell you Will, wherever the hell you are, it’s not as good as it is out here. Come back and see me, see the world, okay? We’re missing you.’
II
The morning after the incident at the Courthouse Will woke in a wretched state: aching from head to foot. He tried to get out of bed, but his legs replayed their imbecilities of the night before and down he went, with such a shout (more of surprise than pain) that his mother came running, to find him sprawled on the floor, teeth chattering. He was duly diagnosed as having ‘flu, and put back to bed, where he was plied with aspirin and scrambled eggs.
Sleet had come in the night, and slapped against the window through most of the day. He wanted to be out in it. His fever would turn the icy downpour to steam, he thought, as soon as it fell on him. He’d walk back to the Courthouse like one of the children from the Bible who’d been burned in a furnace but had come out alive; steaming, he’d walk the muddy track, back to where Jacob and Rosa kept their strange counsel. Naked, he’d go, yes naked, through the hedgerow, scraped and nicked, until he got to the door, where Jacob would be waiting to teach him wisdom, and Rosa would be waiting to tell him what an extraordinary boy he was. Into the Courthouse he’d go, into the heart of their secret world, where everything was love and fire, fire and love.
All this, if he could only get up and out of bed. But his body was cheating him. It was all he could do to get as far as the toilet, and even then he had to hold onto the sink with one hand and his penis – which looked very shrivelled and ashamed of itself right now – with the other, to be sure he wouldn’t fall over, his head was spinning so much. Just after lunch the doctor came to see him. She was a softly-spoken woman with short, white hair, though she didn’t look old enough to have white hair, and a gentle smile. She told him he’d get well as long as he didn’t get out of bed and took the medicine she was going to prescribe, then reassured his mother that he’d be right as rain in a week or so.
A week? Will thought. He couldn’t wait a week to be back with Jacob and Rosa. As soon as the doctor and his mother had gone he got up and made his uncertain way to the window. The sleet was thickening into snow, and it was sticking a little on the tops of the hills. He watched his breath come and go on the cold glass, and determined that he would make himself strong, damn it, simply by telling himself to do so.
He started right then and there: ‘I will be strong. I will be strong. I will—’
He stopped in mid-flow, hearing his Papa’s voice in the hall below, and then the sound of his footstep on the stairs. He started back to his bed, and just made the safety of the covers when the door opened and his father came in, his face more forbidding than the sky outside the window.
‘All right,’ he said, without a word of greeting, ‘I want an explanation from you, my lad, and I don’t want any of your lies. I want the truth.’ Will said nothing. ‘You know why I’m home early?’ his father demanded. ‘Well?’
‘No.’
‘I got a call from Mr Cunningham. Damn lunatic, calling me in the middle of the day. He tracked me down, he said, tracked me down, because his son’s in a terrible state. Can’t stop the boy crying, apparently, because of some damn thing you’ve been up to with him.’ Hugo approached Will’s bed. ‘Now I want to know what stupid stories you’ve been putting in this brat’s head, and don’t shake your head at me like that, young man, you’re not talking to your mother now. I want answers and I want the truth, you hear me?’
‘Sherwood’s…not quite right…’ Will said.
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ Hugo said, spittle flecking his lips.
‘He says things without really knowing what he’s saying.’
‘I don’t care what’s wrong with the little bugger. I just don’t want his father coming to find me and accusing me of raising a complete idiot. That’s what he called you. An idiot! Which you may be, by the way. Have you got no sense?’
Will was starting to get tearful. ‘Sherwood’s my friend,’ he spluttered.
‘He’s not quite right, you said.’
‘He isn’t.’
‘So what does that make you? If you’re his friend, what does that make you? Have you got no sense? What were you up to?’
‘We just went looking around, and he…he got scared…that’s all.’
‘You’ve got a peculiar idea of fun, putting nonsense into a little boy’s head.’ He shook his head. ‘Where’d you get it all from?’ he said, already giving up on his son. Plainly he didn’t want an answer, though Will so much wanted to give him one, so much wanted to say: I didn’t make up anything, you dead-eyed old man. You don’t know what I know, you don’t see what I see. you don’t understand any of it—
But he didn’t dare speak the words, of course. He just cast down his eyes, and let his father’s contempt fall on his head until it was all used up.
Later, his mother came in with pills for him to take. ‘I heard your father having a talk with you,’ she said. ‘You know he’s sometimes harsher than he means to be.’
‘I know.’
‘He says things.’
‘I know what he says and I know what he means,’ Will replied. ‘He wishes I was dead and Nathaniel wasn’t. So do you.’ He shrugged, the ease of the words, the ease of the pain he knew he was causing, exhilarating. ‘It’s no big deal,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I’m not as good as Nathaniel, but I can’t do anything about it.’ All the time he was talking, looking at his mother, it was not her he was seeing, it was Jacob, giving him a moth to burn, Jacob smiling at him.
‘Stop it,’ his mother said. ‘I won’t listen to you talking like this. The way you behave. Take your pills.’ Her manner suddenly became detached, as though she didn’t quite recognize the boy lying in the bed. ‘Are you hungry?’