and hunt down a wren. Men of good will…’
‘Why?’ Roderick asked.
‘Now don’t get all upset, either one of you,’ Pa said. ‘The disguise was beautiful whatever they say. And you done just fine in the play, son. Anyway remember, Christmas is just another Julian day. Day two million, four hundred forty thousand—’
‘Men of good will! Industrial England it was, so of course they had all kinds of funny notions, they, they thought the machines wanted them to do it. Yes so they killed the little bird and crucified it and carried it around the village singing
‘Yeah but why would they do that?’
‘Because, I don’t know why, because they were horrible Manxmen, maybe. People with so little imagination they call their home the Isle of Man—’
‘And,’ Pa said, ‘they couldn’t even put a cat together properly, left the tail inside. Sorry son.’
Roderick did not like jokes about body parts coming apart. Hearing one made him suddenly imagine he could feel the iron rods in his legs. He felt them now, even as he smiled. ‘That’s okay.’
‘That was a very strange play,’ said Ma. ‘All that business about the Virgin Mary, as if the infant didn’t count at all. She’s the big star, and he’s just a silly doll. Reminds me of the Egyptian priests, at the winter solstice they’d all gather in the temple and at midnight they’d come running out with this wooden doll, telling everybody the Virgin had given birth to this new sun, S-U-N I mean—’
‘Another yard of Frazer,’ said Pa. ‘Son, I get this every damn Chris…’
They had to stop to wait for Pa to finish coughing. Roderick looked at the stars. Damn Christmas, Christmas of the damned, dead souls. Burning like candles on a tree. If everyone lit one little candle, Pa always said, we’d have a candle shortage overnight. Pa coughing out his soul in a cloud right here on earth. Spitting in the snow to leave a wren-mark. For Robbie the Bobbin. Hunted by a hawk, up it comes, somebody marking its fall. Souls escaping on a sigh.
Ma always said that souls were only held to Earth by the weight of sin, they rose up to Heaven by dropping it: giving all your pride to the Sun, all your love of money to Mercury, all your lust to Venus, all your gluttony to the Moon, all your anger to Mars, all your envy to Jupiter and all your laziness to Saturn, finally entering the astral sphere to become a pure flame, a star. Which one would be Sister Mary Martha? If Roderick had his way, she’d be the brightest, nightbright as she had been dayplain, the almost invisible virgin now crawling up the stairs of the sky (cleaning each one) to her jewelled crown.
None of them, he guessed. All just burning globs of goop, so many light-years away. And when people died, they went the same place as the mark of a wren in last year’s snow.
Pa finished his cough. ‘Okay, home! Home, to hang up our socks!’
Christmas was all in the head, Pa said (the heart, Ma corrected). So really this home-made tree was just as good as any real one, wasn’t it?
Roderick looked at it and saw tall evergreens, cut down in the mountains by singing lumberjacks, hauled to town on horse-drawn sledges with bells all over them. It was set up in a house where there were wreaths on the doors and red candles in the windows, to guide visitors who would arrive any minute in their top hats and bonnets, laughing all the way to the bank, through the banks of snow and loaded down with presents (and of course cards showing all of this), Bob Cratchit goose puddings, black servants beaming at them over silver trays of eggnogs, giant dolls and electric trains that Father would play with when not admiring his new pipe and shotgun, but not half as much as Mother admired her new automatic kitchen machinery or her genuine diamonds lasting a lifetime or her personal transit car, just right for shopping (for turkey and trimmings, gifting ideas or magazines showing all of this including cards on the mantel (showing all…)) or for getting the kids Back to School, so much easier and fun to learn with a homework computer, just coming out of that big box under the glittering tree. The tree…
At the same time, Roderick saw it was only the bottom of a cardboard box with a green triangle drawn on it and a light bulb stuck through a hole. The bulb wasn’t really connected to anything, but then it was burned out anyway. And anyway, they had to keep the power-bill down this month. And all the other bills, like food. Ma and Pa would be imagining their Christmas dinner too, and probably their presents.
All the same, they hung up three stockings on the back of three dining-room chairs. And in the morning there was stuff in them!
In Pa’s stocking there was a beautiful hand-painted certificate awarding him the Nobel Prize for Inventions. And a drop of water.
In Ma’s stocking there was a wonderful little machine to help her make up titles for her sculptures: two cardboard wheels with words on them
The drops of water had been snowflakes when Roderick put them in the stockings. Ma and Pa said they could see that they’d been pretty terrific snowflakes, too.
In Roderick’s stocking was a foot.
‘Don’t look so puzzled, son.’ Pa went out to his workshop and brought in the rest of the present: a complete, full-sized adult body in pink plastic, with a gleaming stainless steel head.
‘Oh,’ said Roderick, trying to sound pleased. ‘Clothes.’
XVIII
‘Frankly, Father, I expected something like this. You would give him those
‘Kierkegaard? But Sister, it’s just, just a book about faith, the blind leap into darkn—’
‘All the same, Father. All the same.’ Sister Filomena held out the essay by two fingers, avoiding contamination. ‘No doubt you’ll be wanting a word with him about this.’
‘Well of course I’ll speak to the boy if…’
‘Boy! Lord have mercy on us, he can’t even get his knees under the desk. He’s head and shoulders over all the other children. Yes and all the girls have been — well,
‘Maybe we should graduate him or something… but you know, I keep feeling I’m almost getting through to him. Oh, sinful pride maybe, but I, it’s just that I’ve never had the opportunity before to bring into the faith a ro — a person like him.’
Sister Filomena
And so it went, through all the scenarios where Abraham, believing or doubting the voice, killed Isaac, was killed by Isaac, killed himself, killed someone else, killed an animal; where the altar (badly built) collapsed, killing them both or one of them; where a voice told him to look in a near-by thicket for his real victim (which turned out to be a ram, another son, a mirror); where he ignores the second voice and kills Isaac, and one intriguing version where, having raised the knife to strike,
Hard to blame the Springtime and glands for stuff like this. Especially when Father Warren could not yet be
