The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 3

  “You certainly have a way with language, Hans. You can certainly hit the nail on the head,” said my father, whose familiarity with Holy Writ was perhaps not as great as my uncle need have feared.

  Between these two groups sat my mother silently poring over her beloved rock collection—the unsung saint and unsuspected villain of the whole works. For in that innocent hobby lurked something far more traitorous to our world and life view than my father’s doubts and my brother’s iconoclasm. It was not until years afterward that I thought in those terms of the scene which ended that long night.

  When the last caller had left, my uncle sat down to draft at white heat some notes for a sermon inspired by the evening’s events. Its text was the first verse of Genesis, and it was to be a treatise on the exact age of the earth, as deduced from chronologies of the Old and New Testaments and other reliable sources to be six thousand years. He worked at a parlor table overflowing, as did many another piece of furniture, with my mother’s beloved specimens—talismans from her Dutch birthplace carried across the sea, souvenirs of every vacation taken in this country and every walk along the Lake Michigan beach. I sat nearby, permitted to watch.

  “There,” said my uncle, when his pencil had raced to a flourishing stop. He evened the manuscript pages together, then looked for a paperweight to keep them from blowing away in the summer breeze that rustled the curtains at the open window. He selected, of course, one of my mother’s minerals. It was a piece of fossil from the Paleozoic era, five hundred million years old.

  two

  For a long time my father had insomnia, and so was let sleep till all hours. “Shh” was the first word I learned, and as an injunction aimed at me, not at others on my infant behalf, and walking on tiptoe my first conception of human locomotion, gained through the slats of my crib.

  After retiring at a conventional enough hour, my father would lie wide-eyed until dawn, when he would sink into a slumber lasting until noon. This gave him a tenure of sixteen hours between the sheets and eight out, more or less reversing the normal human ratio. He had an ice route with a partner named Wigbaldy, Dutch-born like himself, who bore the brunt of this dislocation, carrying on alone until with the sun high in the sky my father would appear in one or another of the Chicago alleys up which they plied their trade with horse and wagon, or what was more likely, overtake Wigbaldy at one of the many saloons they serviced, at least until Prohibition, ready for the day’s first refreshment. Like most insomniacs, he resented any implication that he had slept well or, indeed, at all.

  Numerous reasons were given for my father’s disturbance, which continued intermittently for years and survived two business partners. One was his hankerings for his homeland, another those religious doubts, and still another, worry over what Louie might be up to while he tossed and turned. Since it was into my own bed that Louie crept at last, full of tales, his nocturnal exploits were known to me long before I was of an age to give concern on that score myself. He took his girls into the bushes of Chicago’s splendid park system, there to pursue his advantage with excerpts from Shelley and Swinburne recited in the accents of the streets off which he had lured them:

  As, when late larks give warning

  Of dying lights and dawning,

  Night murmurs to de morning,

  “Lie still, O love, lie still;”

  And half her dark limbs cover

  De light limbs of her lover,

  Wit’ amorous plumes dat hover

  And fervent lips dat chill.

  Add to these assorted apprehensions the anxiety my mother never ceased expressing over my habit of sleeping with Louie. I was always a delicate child, while he had never been sick a day in his life, and everyone knew what happened when two people of such unequal constitutions shared the same bed: the stronger drained away the vitality of the weaker.

  The opinions of someone who thought Christ was a Hollander were not to be taken lightly. They were the more formidable for a thousand years of European credence behind them, as was the case with the conviction about the sleeping arrangement. My mother forcibly broke it up several times, driving me into the small spare room vacated by my grandparents whenever they left us for a turn in another of the filial households among which they systematically rotated; or what was oftener the case, making me stay there after having been banished to it for the duration of an illness. In the end I always stole back, sometimes in the dead of night, to the brother I adored. Then after a few more months the cry for segregation would be revived. The seven-year gap in our ages meant a disadvantage in size, increasing the certainty that my vigor was being nightly sapped away. And indeed I went from measles to mumps (diagnosed by thrusting a pickle into the suspect’s mouth and observing his facial reaction) to scarlet fever to yellow jaundice to God knows what all. We were quarantined four times and fumigated twice. My slender frame and precarious bloodstream seemed a catchall for every malady obtainable.

  The thing for which I was perhaps best suited was pneumonia. I had three or four bouts of that, none serious, and each equipping me to throw off its successor with greater ease—the blessed paradox of the sickly. Of its counterpart, the man who “never had a sick day in his life” and has therefore accumulated no antibodies, my brother was destined to give tragic proof.

  One raw winter day in his twentieth year, Louie came home from the University with a terrible chill. He shook as he undressed and climbed into bed. We had no thermometer, and it was not until Doc Berkenbosch arrived that evening that we learned he had a fever of a hundred and three and a half. Doc stowed his stethoscope away with no more than his usual sobriety and a casual, “Got a mean chest cold there, boy.” But after leaving the bedroom, he beckoned us into the sitting room and said, “I think I’ll stay a while. Vrouw Wanderhope, how about a cup coffee?”

  Now I had to sleep in the spare room because Louie was sick, a strange and disquieting novelty. Far into the uneasy night I could hear the grownups murmuring in the adjacent living room. The smells of tobacco and coffee seeped under my closed door. I was awake when Doc left at midnight and awake when he returned at dawn.

  All that day and the next, Saturday and Sunday, I knew Louie’s life hung by a thread. The word “crisis” quivered like an arrow in my heart. On Sunday afternoon, having looked in on Louie again, Doc dropped the words “both lungs.” The minister was summoned after evening service, to conduct a devotional in our house. He read a Psalm, and then everyone knelt at his chair to pray. We had the customary “parlor suit” of the period—a sofa and two Cogswell chairs embroidered in romantic or woodland scenes. The face of a shepherd boy smiled at me through the patterns of a crocheted white tidy as I stared through my fingers, not praying so much as listening to the prayer. The words “life everlasting” dropped from ministerial lips were my first intimation of mortality.

  My sensation, rather than fear or piety, was a baffled and uncomprehending rage. That flesh with which I had lain in comradely embrace destroyable, on such short notice, by a whim known as divine? By what authority and to what authority must this sleek version of the routed Uncle Hans plead for the life of a lad as beguiling as the shepherd grinning at me by the needlework river? Who wantonly scattered such charm, who broke such flesh like bread for his purposes? In later years, years which brought me to another such vigil over one more surely my flesh and blood, I came to understand a few things about what people believe. What people believe is a measure of what they suffer. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away”—there must be balm of some sort in that for men whose treasures have been confiscated. These displaced Dutch fisherfolk, these farmers peddling coal and ice in a strange land, must have had their reasons for worshiping a god scarcely distinguishable from the devil they feared. But the boy kneeling on the parlor floor was shut off from such speculatory solaces. All the theologies inherent in the minister’s winding drone came down to this: Believe in God and don’t put anything past him. Or another thought formed itself in the language of the streets i
n which the boy had learned crude justice and mercy: “Why doesn’t He pick on somebody his size?”

  It was in vain that I strove to feel anything like a sense of prayer. My thoughts were like the smoke of Cain’s altar fire, imagined as not ascending. Yet being unable to pray for Louie was loyalty to Louie, whose disciple I had early been. I remembered a church entertainment of which one of the numbers had been a monologue condensed from a Christmas legend by Henry van Dyke entitled “The Lost Word.” It was about a well-born youth of ancient Antioch who backslides from Christianity, bartering the name of God for worldly ease in a kind of Faustian bargain with a pagan priest in the Grove of Daphne, into which he has wandered seeking respite for his spirit. When after some years his little son lies at the point of death, he cannot pray for the boy’s life, having forfeited the Name in which alone supplication can be made. The piece was a favorite dear to local spell-binders who gripped their audiences with lines like: “The roses bloomed and fell in the garden; the birds sang and slept among the jasmine-bowers. But in the heart of Hermas there was no song.” His old teacher, John of Antioch, reappears at the critical moment with the word he has forgotten, then at last Hermas can pray for his son, and … “Was it an echo? It could not be, for it came again—the voice of the child, clear and low, waking from sleep, and calling: ‘My father, my father!’” In the applause that burst over the retiring elocutionist, Louie had turned to me and whispered, “Pure hokum.” It was the first time I had heard the word, but its meaning was instantly clear to me, hitching up my standards with a force that opened vistas, that made me laugh and nod even as I clapped madly with eyes full of tears—tears left over from the preceding period, that of gullibility, or unsophistication, from which I had just abruptly graduated.

  What would Louie have thought of the scene being enacted in his behalf now? I turned to steal a glance at my parents. My father was making faces appropriate to supplication behind his hairy hands. His mugging seemed a shade more human, now, though perhaps also slightly less sane. The smell of bourbon mingled with the mystic fumes of prayer. His suspenders were unhooked and hung down in two festoons in a manner that made my mind leap prophetically forward from all this to another life I knew awaited me. This was the “worldly” life denounced by the church, in which Louie had briefly walked and toward which I would in due course set my feet. What I felt, like a bubble of anticipation bursting in a sea of grief, is perhaps difficult to explain to anyone except in terms of some other such anarchic childhood vision of his own: a window opened on the world, an apocalyptic flash, very likely all nothing more than lyric expressions of the plan to Get Away from Home. In my case it included the special pains of a boy chafing under an immigrant culture, for whom “wider horizons” meant those from the advantage of which people shouted at you on the street:

  Oh, the Irish and the Dutch

  Don’t amount to very much.

  My father’s habits and appearance excited in me this desire for a more fashionable world. The houses around the Midway where Louie went to school embodied it.

  My mother was another story. Her head was bowed, but under the bony hands I knew the face, gray as the hair that framed it, was a mask. Fear for the moment kept every other emotion at bay. Till it was time, Moeke, as Louie had always affectionately continued to call her, would give no sign. Then she would pluck her hair out by the roots.

  The easy rote of the minister’s words faltered as the prayer took a more portentous turn.

  “We know that this child of grace, this son of the Covenant, has in his youth expressed doubts of Thy … Grant that in this hour … may yet be time … remission of his sins in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

  Rising from the floor was a rustling reintrusion of the physical, absurdly fatal to the spiritual mood we sought. We seemed more insignificant on our feet than kneeling—pathetic seekers after what the very strain of seeking seemed to disperse. The minister wheezed a little, and I could not keep my mind off the muscles for wagging a bygone tail on which it was Louie’s story that he now sat. Only for a moment, however. After such a prayer he must go in to see Louie, more directly to pursue the hope expressed in it. Nobody could have found fault with the way he did this.

  A doctor’s “no visitors” order was not taken to include pastoral calls, and anyhow the question of not disturbing Louie was academic now, since he had been in a near-coma for some hours. He did not seem aware of the minister slipping in, and the rest of us after him, to range ourselves in a hushed row at the foot of the brass bed.

  Louie’s golden head was rolled away from us, toward the wall. His curls were a damp tangle, his brow beaded with sweat. He breathed through his mouth, irregular gasps that strained his throat and reached the vain destination of his lungs with great laboring heaves. My mother wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and after that we all watched with inclined heads, and that expression of gentle, hopeless love with which human dying is witnessed. Louie snored on. Once he stirred and mumbled something that sounded like “No problem of mine.” From far down the street came the sound of a grind organ trolling out the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana.

  Doc was with us, and something in Louie’s breathing made him push his way forward with his stethoscope, that useless prop. He shook his head after listening through it, and stepped back again. Then, like something fluidly rehearsed between them many a time, the minister stepped forward. I shall never forget the grace with which he performed his chore.

  “It’s dot old klets again, Louie. Dot old Van Scoyen who bores you, eh, boy? Och ja, ik ben en kletskous.” (I am a chatterbox.)

  Louie opened one eye, then both, at this. After taking the minister’s face in with a prolonged, glassy stare, he nodded once. For a moment, the old ironic grin curled his cracked lips. Van Scoyen wasted no more time.

  “We hope you’re going to be feeling better tomorrow, old boy, and that you’ll be out of this soon. Then you’ll have to put up with the old klets again. But just now, Louie, I want to ask you. You have expressed doubts. You don’t have doubts any more now, eh, jongen?”

  We stood in a frozen circle, waiting. Louie’s face lost its expression, and his head rolled back toward the wall. Fearing he was slipping into unconsciousness again, my mother pressed in and bent closely over him. A long, quivering sigh shook him from head to foot, a moan asking that he be left in peace.

  “It’s Moeke, Louie,” she said. “You have no doubts, have you, Louie?”

  The rolling motion of his head became a negative shake. He said in an unexpectedly clear voice, “No—no doubts.”

  A single sigh of relief went through the room. Louie closed his eyes, and we were sure he was gone. Then, as I watched, I saw them open again and his gaze fix on me, and me alone. The old grin wreathed his lips once more as he said slyly, for just my benefit, “No doubts on my part.”

  It was the last communication between us. He died about three o’clock that morning with my mother and me in the bedroom, keeping watch beside his bed. We had both dozed, exhausted, in our chairs and, awakened by the sudden silence in the room, saw that Louie had left us.

  He had gone at his best, leaving to each what was needed most. To Moeke, peace of mind on the terms she required. To me, freedom from uncertainty too—from that faith with whose account of Louie I could not have lived. No more need I go on thinking in anguished rage: “Why doesn’t He pick on somebody his size?” “He” did not exist. So Louie had died saying.

  My mother did not quite yet give way. She rose and, taking something from the dresser, began to brush his golden hair.

  three

  After his death, Louie remained as much as ever a model to me, or even more, being now idealized in my mind. His life had been of course anything but model by the standards of the household in which his departure had torn so cruel a gash, but all that was to the end successfully kept from Moeke. My father continued fluctuating wildly between Faith and Reason, hardly a figure to excite the concern to which he aspired, or even to b
e taken seriously, being rather like one of those comedians seen hanging from cliffs as they mugged at the depths below, in the films to which we snuck under interdict. I quickly removed from Louie’s room all that would have hurt our Moeke or reminded her of the days before his feigned conversion: books of an agnostic stripe, snapshots of girls clearly not of the Covenant, some illustrated pamphlets on the “art of love” from a locked cabinet, to which I finally found the key.

  Such stuff Louie had himself long since outgrown, but to me, now of the age at which they had come to him in plain wrappers, they were treasures to be again restored to lock and key for later delectation. Between what they told me and what I had learned from Louie’s small-hour recitals of his experiences, I was, by the age of sixteen or so, a diligent if not exactly subtle amorist prowling the gravel paths of Hamilton Park in search of “frails” and “cookies.” With no better a version of the Chicago street diction than his, I lay—while Moeke waited at the window and Pa twisted among the sheets—in the municipal bushes as Louie had, murmuring into some feminine ear: